Reaching out - what's really going on?

‘No decision about me without me’ – A positive vision where by patients have real power to shape their health service. This mantra set out for CCGs in the NHS White Paper, Equity and Excellence: Liberating the NHS, is being brought up time after time. But how do we get to talk to these people and really find out what’s going on at the heart of their lives? Yes, it’s pretty straightforward getting the opinions of regular patients but what about those so called “hard-to-reach” groups who hardly ever step foot in a GP surgery.

I spoke to one man recently who hadn’t seen a doctor for the last 67 years! How would you go about engaging with him?

This is where clever marketing comes into play and something that a lot of CCG boards will have to quickly get their heads round.

Be it creating services and campaigns for the NHS or a private sector company, the eskimosoup team have found that, the outcomes are the same. It is about adding business value by gaining insights about the needs and views of customers and designing an offer round them.

This can range from conducting in-depth market research to creating some informative and quality PR; from a big social media push to putting on events to encourage new people to get involved.

Smoke’s No Joke, a campaign eskimosoup and Hull NHS are running in schools aims to prevent smoking in young people. It targets teenagers who, without the help of these interactive sessions coming in and breaking down barriers, may not have sought their doctors help, may have stayed off the radar and not been able to get involved with the future of their NHS.

Another prime example of this was our Facebook profile “Midwife Hull” which was created as part of a campaign to stop women smoking in pregnancy. This social media profile has been a huge success in providing support for pregnant women who are not approaching their GP or midwife. It allows them to ask for advice or just to share their views on the health service knowing there is a well-informed NHS worker responding to their queries.

Clever thinking like this can break down barriers and create opportunities to reach a far greater amount of people than just those who take the time to fill in a questionnaire sat in the doctor’s waiting room.

Involving people on a much deeper level will inevitably lead to better quality and more responsive services that can be sustained.