"Can I speak to a serial killer?": there"s more to NHS comms than you"d think

“Can I speak to Peter Sutcliffe?”

The journalist was perfectly serious. I was working in communications at Broadmoor hospital and he saw me as a route to people he thought were patients there. He wanted Sutcliffe’s “take” on a series of recent “Ripper style” murders in the Ipswich area. I explained – while trying to not audibly gasp – that Broadmoor could not confirm who its patients were, let alone put them up for press interviews.

Every so often, an FOI request asks how much the NHS spends on “communications”. The easy headline is that the NHS needs real doctors, not spin doctors. But it is only when you look at the range of activities that communications cover that you wonder if the real spin doctors are those writing the story.

To some, communications is just shorthand for public relations and spin. In fact, responding to media queries (and FOI requests) – which the NHS is rightly expected to do as a public service – is a tiny proportion of our work.

Much of it is about making sure staff know what’s going on in their organisation, that information for patients is clear and easy to access and that MPs, local councils, regulators and community organisations are kept informed and involved in what the NHS is doing.

I have worked at a large trust where there was no system in place for briefing staff on the wards about things they needed to know. I’ve worked in places where every department was producing its own, homemade newsletter that was badly written, misspelt and missed out the information patients needed. I have had to advocate for people’s right to know about changes to local services and to develop plans to reach people who don’t read newspapers, rarely visit their GP and certainly don’t attend NHS meetings.

Part of the job is to manage press and public interest in the event of a major incident. This involves careful planning, working with other emergency services. How do you keep people informed, including your own staff, concerned members of the public and relatives of those impacted? Where do they all go in a busy working hospital? And major incidents come in different shapes and sizes. If a high-profile patient dies in your hospital, you need to be able to manage not just a potential media scrum disrupting your hospital, but the needs of the family too. I recall liaising with one very high-profile family after their son died, because they wanted to visit the hospital morgue without being accosted by the press.

Then there is the navigation issue. How does a person find their way around a hospital, let alone the whole NHS? Part of our job is to make sure that patients can get to the service they need as quickly as possible. How do we reach every potential patient to achieve this? How do we describe different services to the public? (spoiler: not always very helpfully).

I don’t deny that the odd Amateur Alistair surfaces, desperate to turn their job running comms for a cottage hospital into The Thick of It. But they are a rare breed. The majority of us see our job as helping the public, the media and a huge range of stakeholders to understand how the NHS works, the challenges it is facing and how they might be able to help. If you think about the huge numbers of services we provide, the many different communities we serve and the amount of information that implies, this is far from easy.

In recent years we have seen the beginnings of a sea change in the way the NHS talks to patients and the public. Expertise in consultation and community engagement is increasingly valued, not just because these things are required of the NHS, but because we know that involving patients in the development of services improves those services no end.

Some of the best conversations I have had about the NHS have been with the public. Most people understand the challenges presented by an ageing society, flat funding and increasingly expensive treatments. While they will not always agree with each other – or the NHS – on the best solutions, I am yet to attend an NHS public engagement event where I didn’t hear several good ideas. Of course, there is the odd moment – one man went around each person on a table, asked them their background and announced none of them were as qualified as him to talk about “his NHS” – but we should not underestimate the positive contribution patients and the public can make.

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"Can I speak to a serial killer?": there"s more to NHS comms than you"d think