Teaching an old dog new tricks

By Adam Johnson, E-Communications Manager, Betsi Cadwaladr University Health Board

Over 10 years ago I picked up a pen and notepad and proceeded to dip my toe into the choppy waters of local journalism. Back then it was a novelty to have your own email, social media was picking the newspaper in a cafe and gossiping about stories with friends and mobile phones hurt a lot more if dropped on your big toe.

I made the decision to vault the fence over into the communications arena in 2007 when the newspaper industry had just about batted an eye towards the internet. We all felt printed media had a rosy red future and could link arms happily with the words of the web, but boy, five years down the line, who would have predicted how much advances in technology would impact on your traditional daily rag.

Hard copy news is almost becoming a second thought to editors out there . Their main bread and butter is keeping up with the Jones…Williams, Smiths, the millions of people connecting to the internet and social media each day thanks to growing opportunities through new smart phones and shiny PC tablets.

Papers have had to up their game and reach out to their readers through Facebook, Twitter, blogs.

Joe Bloggs reporter has gone from being an isolated face behind a  keyboard, to a daily mate on your own site, giving you an update of how strong the morning coffee is or informing you of their story countdown for the day.

 Its clever stuff,  good relationships are solid to a journo’s daily diet for creating the news, and new news opportunities are coming at them faster than ever before.

You are more likely to snaffle up breaking news in from a reporters Twitter Post than a freshly printed paper these days, and there lies the power of social media.

Newspaper industries have worked hard to at first overcome and then adapt to the changing face of the world wide web and today, social media is an integral part of their news gathering and reporting operations.

Could this mantra be ported across to the NHS? In parts yes it can. Despite the boundaries of patient confidentiality, adapting key care advice, support and messages to reach out to Facebook friends can really make a difference to patients recovering in the community. Relationships can be built up with browsers by treating them to  health information to help them lead well lives or chatting about important services to set their minds at rest before a visit to the hospital.

Newspapers have welcomed in social media as a friend and extra pair of hands for the job. For the NHS, embracing social media can create a new form of virtual health advisors, reaching far and wide to support care provided in communities…through the many tricks and tabs available.

It’s never too late to teach an old dog new tricks, a decade ago hitting printed deadlines meant everything to me, now it’s getting a post to push the boundaries and beat net records for hit counts, to ultimately make a difference online to browsers surfing for health support.

Picture credit: Boston Public Library

Social mobility

By Chris Davies, Senior Journalist, Cardiff and Vale UHB

A midnight phone call to the BBC is not usually on the menu whilst having dinner with friends on a Friday night. But that is what happened as Cardiff and Vale UHB endured its most serious incident for many years.

UHW was the focus of media attention that Friday night.

Twitter had become awash with rumours that UHW had run out of blood. What had started as knee-jerk appeal from NHS Blood in England soon escalated into rallying calls for people to descend on the hospital, sleeves rolled up ready to play their part. The last thing any hospital needs on a Friday night, let alone one that brings so much heart breaking trauma to its doors, is people turning up who don’t need to be there – no matter how good their intentions. Estelle, the Assistant Director of Strategic Communications for the health board, rang and asked me to put something out quickly to dismiss the talk that supplies were running out. A hastily drafted Tweet was dispatched into the Twitosphere. Having only a few hundred followers I thought it would be useful to draft in the help of some ‘big guns’, hence the call to BBC and other media who had wider audiences and added further reassurance for a worried public. Quickly people started retweeting, but what became apparent was that people were still tweeting and retweeting earlier rumours, keeping the misinformation circulating and causing confusion (quite why people were giving equal weight to Joe Blogs on Twitter and the UHB’s official account I don’t know). But gradually the ‘truth prevailed’ although the rumours did pop back up over the weekend briefly, due, I’m assuming, to infrequent users of social media coming across the rumours and retweeting them before seeing later tweets dismissing them. So what have I taken from this? Firstly, that there is nothing like hard facts to back up a theory. For the best part of two years many of us have been making a case that social media is a key part of any comms function. The role of social media in managing information after the incident, good and bad, was important. The UHB’s tweet dismissing rumours received more than 256 retweets and reached tens of thousands of people. The online reaction to the tragic incident in Cardiff proved two things: that people use social media for their news and put huge stock in that shared by friends (or even total strangers) and that it is vitally important to have a presence on social media. Can you imagine what could have happened if the rumours about blood supplies being low and calls for people to turn up to UHW had gone unchallenged? For me another interesting fact was where I was when I was doing it. My good friend’s kitchen suddenly became an impromptu comms hub – no desk, office or anything else. With my iPhone, apps and friend’s wi-fi I had all I needed to connect with the audience and get those messages out there. As the dust continues to settle I’m sure there’ll be more lessons to learn from these tragic events in both traditional comms management and social media. For me, speaking with the media at midnight is not how I intended to end my week’s holiday, but it provided me with more insight into the potential for social media, evidence to back it up and also a hot topic for after-dinner discussion (and a reminder of the importance of having a phone charger to hand). *Will try and share some thoughts later in the week on the incredible public response to our Facebook message of thanks to staff. Picture credit: top UHW at night (Mark Turner)

Brown socks and the importance of co-ordinated communications

By Rachel Lewis, Online Communications Manager, NWIS

Brown socks – does anyone know where I can find a pair?

Is it possible to find dark brown socks? Every other colour no problem, but dark brown (I like to be coordinated – to match my eyes !) I can’t seem to find them anywhere – it’s impossible.

It’s difficult for us all to co-ordinate our communications, let alone our socks and outfits so how can we make it better.

As a fairly recently formed national organisation NHS Wales Informatics Service (NWIS), we sometimes find that it  isn’t always easy to raise awareness. So how do we tell the rest of the NHS about the work we do? Usually the IT staff know who we are but what about the staff on the ground – do they?

My Health Online – requesting repeat prescriptions and booking an appointment on the internet

On that note I want to tell you about My Health Online, not literally My  Health as I wouldn’t want to bore you but a new service available to patients in nearly 130 GP practices across Wales. Even though my own practice isn’t yet able to offer this I’d like to give an example of where I would have been straight on the internet using it the other day.

I already had an appointment with the nurse at the treatment centre and decided I also needed to see the GP at the same time. So I rang a week before , and after a while getting through was told to ring back on the Monday before my appointment (I wasn’t told a specific time to ring back). I then rang on the Monday and waited and waited. I then got through in the afternoon and was told I should have rung in the morning. I was then told to try on the day I came in for the nurse appointment. So I did and guess what? I didn’t get an appointment. With My Health Online, already used by nearly 50,000 patients across Wales, it would have been a much easier process. I could have just picked up my mobile, logged on to My Health Online and booked the appointment – one short step instead of waiting on the phone.

We would like to make more use of the local communications resources to publicise the IT systems supporting patient care and the IT staff behind them. Maybe launch a campaign called ‘Tell IT to my heart’ – information and technology at the heart of health. And yes I am showing my age by quoting that song by Taylor Dane – and forget brown socks I’d like a fluorescent pair of leg warmers (maybe not). That’s just me reminiscing.

Seriously, communications staff are quite new to the health service, when I started in NHS Wales in 2003 (not that long ago), they were few and far between. Now it’s great to have this network but how do we make best use of it? We are already working more closely with our IT colleagues but we could still all be using the web in a much more coordinated way by using content aggregation.  It is a bit like the way the news appears on HOWIS now e.g it is picked up from all the other NHS Wales websites – published once and redistributed many times – without this content can go out of date quickly.

Let me demonstrate: When we announced the skills and development programme for Health Informatics, rather than sending you all an email, an alert pops up on the content management system (CMS) so if it’s an item related to your Health Board, e.g. one of the successful candidates for the management trainee scheme was from Aneurin Bevan, you can pick it up (no cutting and pasting, no links breaking, it’s much more instant).  Even better if the electronic newsletter facility uses the same technology as the CMS it can appear in your relevant internal newsletters.

The apprenticeships / graduate internships are also available in a variety of Welsh health organisations so when we know about who is successful on these we’ll let you know. We will have to use email though because we haven’t got content aggregation (which allows publishing once but pushing out to multiple channels – information more timely and up to date). Summing up content aggregation is kind of like a news feed. The same messages i.e.  from a national consultation can be fed to the right places instantly.

Maybe the person making the brown socks doesn’t have the resource to tell the world about them, maybe they don’t have that essential news feed. Maybe those brown sock are out there somewhere. Maybe through easier to use communications channels like the web and social media  I will get to hear about them. Oh don’t forget have you liked us on Facebook or are you following us on Twitter?

Breaking news?

In our house the sad story of April Jones broke at around 7.30pm. Friends and family from mid-Wales were sharing appeals for information from local people via Facebook.

My first reaction was to check the BBC to get the official line but there was nothing there, prompting the idea it may be an incredibly poor taste hoax.

The story spread quickly on social media as networks of friends tried to do their bit and help with the appeal. Friends started talking about the huge numbers of people joining search efforts confirming the story for us – but there was still no word on official sources. I think it was gone 9pm that BBC Online finally had something up on the story (interestingly a Google search shows Wrexham.com, an independent news website as having reported the story first).

As the desperately sad story began to develop and hope of an early return home faded I was once again impressed with the power of social media to quickly galvanise a community around an issue. But I also wondered what it said about the future of traditional media.

It is at least the second time I can remember hearing major news through social media (Twitter informed me that Amy Winehouse had died) and certainly shows the power of the tool, but what does it mean for comms professionals?

Some commentaries on the shift in power between traditional and social media read like a eulogy. It is certainly true circulation figures are falling and newspapers are struggling to find revenues to pay shareholders their dividend. It is also likely to be the case that many people these days pay more attention to their social media newsfeed than they do the traditional news broadcasts and check them more regularly than news websites.

It is a trend that is likely to increase as a generation brought up on getting their news from a daily paper and the television news bulletins make way for an audience born with a smart phone in their hand.

But it would be wrong to start measuring up the coffin for traditional news. My experience shows that there will always be a need for an official, reliable, trusted source of news. People want to have that authoritative confirmation of whichever bit of gossip, political speculation or tragic tale of humanity they are seeing posted across their social media networks.

It remains vital, therefore, that health comms professionals maintain and build those links with the traditional media. With unprecedented change on the horizon for the NHS the scope for social media to be awash with rumour, misinformation and political mischief making is huge.

Comms professionals can certainly engage these issues directly on these platforms. But in the difficult, emotive debates that the NHS generates it can be hard for the case for change to be taken on face value. It is therefore vital that there is a well informed, unbiased third party that can look at the issues, digest the facts and present them in an authoritative way that people can trust.

In turn they need to have faith in those they are dealing with. That can only be created by developing an honest relationship where the black, the white and the grey are all discussed. A relationship built on spin will just leave you dizzy and falling on your behind.    

The events in Machynlleth of the past week have shown the potential of all media to play a part in informing, uniting and empowering communities to do great things and the important role that a reliable, up-to-date source of information (comms professionals) can play in that evolving news landscape.

Dig for victory

My name is Chris and I am a World War Two junkie. I’ve been star struck whilst interviewing war veterans who fought across Europe and who served as prisoners of war in Asia. I’ve solemnly stood on the beaches of Normandy and I’ve visited the war graves in France and Belgium and silently honoured the anonymous last resting places of long-dead men, younger than myself.

I think my interest was lit by my grandfather’s tales of the war and his own fascination with the conflict, and kindled by history lessons in the Nazis and the propaganda that changed a nation and world history. (It would be easy at this point to make the connection to modern day comms, because I know you’re wondering where it’s coming from, but I won’t.)

But I think what really captured my imagination with the war was the story of good versus evil, the Blitz spirit and everyone pulling together which has been retold in all media over the last 67 years. It may be a romanticised view of the world back then but it is one I find inspiring.

It is that sense of collaboration, of a shared goal, that I want to capture in this first blog post. The hope is that this blog/site will become a forum for working together, if not against the Nazis, then at least on the huge amounts of challenges that face health comms over the coming months and years.

Cwm Taf’s Paul Edmonds made an excellent point at a recent Digital Comms Group meeting (I say recent, it was a good few months ago but I’m pretty sure that counts in the busy world of the NHS). He said that when you consider the NHS is Wales’ biggest employer with 71,817 staff, the amount of resource being spent on comms is tiny.

Nobody is about to start banging the drum about more money and more resources for comms in the current climate, (I don’t think we could afford a drum in the first place) which means we have to start making sure we’re as efficient as possible and providing as much value for money as we can.

That is what I hope this blog/site can achieve. To help us lift our heads up on a regular basis to see and hear what our colleagues in other parts of the camp are doing, and look for ways to lighten each other’s loads. There’s no point in each of us digging tunnels in the same direction hoping to clear the fence and taste freedom when we can do it quicker, with much less work, and reduced risk of the roof caving, in by doing it together.

In the last few months we’ve begun to see the benefits of what we can achieve when we put our spades together. We’ve made quick wins in getting engagement with colleagues in IT, seen improvements to Cascade and even cleared (some) of the hurdles and allowed tools like Twitter and Yammer to start being used more widely.

There is a huge amount of work facing all of us at the moment, and you may wonder if a venture such as this is worth the time and effort. I hope it is and that it can grow as a community, as a resource, and help us all put our spades to best use. Dig for victory!