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. 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. 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. How do we reach every potential patient to achieve this? How do we describe different services to the public? (spoiler: not always very helpfully). 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. 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. 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. 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. This involves careful planning, working with other emergency services. Part of the job is to manage press and public interest in the event of a major incident. 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. 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 worked at a large trust where there was no system in place for briefing staff on the wards about things they needed to know. 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. 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. To some, communications is just shorthand for public relations and spin. 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. The easy headline is that the NHS needs real doctors, not spin doctors. Every so often, an FOI request asks how much the NHS spends on “communications”.
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