The Changing NHS

It looks like NHS providers could have wide scope to promote themselves and their services. See the consultation document Code of Practice for Promotion of NHS services.This makes a great deal of sense given the increasing amount of real competition amongst Trusts and between NHS providers and private and independent sector providers. But are NHS Trusts going to be any good at it? A few thoughts spring to mind:

1. What are you promoting?

Traditionally NHS organisations, especially acute Trusts, have found it hard to take tough decisions about ‘what type of organisation are we trying to become?’, preferring instead to remain ‘Jack of all Trades and (arguably) Masters of None’. But comprehensiveness, although ideologically appealing to many is not easy to do well. In fact I can’t think of a single successful company that has earned success on the back of convincing customers that “we’re really good at everything”. If you’re not convinced try reading Focus by Al Ries;

2. What are potential customers interested in?

NHS culture is often best summarised as top-down bureaucratic managerialism. Although managers sometimes talk about customer focus, Trusts still find it incredibly hard to break free from rules based behaviour. Well so what? What’s this culture thing got to do with promotional activity? Take a few minutes to randomly browse a selection of Trust websites and you'll see. Far too many NHS Trust sites are designed to deliberately draw visitors' attention to links to The Top Team, Meet the Board, Trust Turnover etc. Is this what a potential customer really wants to see? By contrast take a close look at Sharp Healthcare’s Site. Sharp is a successful not for profit healthcare provider system in Southern California that is shifting it's culture -using the phrase "The Sharp Experience". Sharp won the best US healthcare website award in 2006 and that takes some doing when you operate in the world's most advanced consumerist society. If you want to start redesigning your website to better meet customer needs a good first step is to ask your communication staff to read Don't Make Me Think - the best web site design book I've seen. Also take a look at the recent DoH choice survey results to see what reasons NHS elective surgery patients give for choosing a provider.

3. Who are you competing with?

Much of the last 10 years of healthcare policy in England has been based on the belief that “a service just for the poor is a poor service”, so it will be interesting to see where promotional spend will be focused. What will be the balance between spending on competing with other NHS providers versus spending focused on differentiating trusts from private providers (and appealing to middle class professionals)? This latter act is a tricky thing for a Trust to do well if acting on its own. Perhaps we might see clusters of NHS trusts combining promotional budgets to compete with the bigger national private provider chains?

4. Where are you doing it?

I (together with millions of other website owners) am a member of Google’s Adsense program (where Google automatically places adverts on my site matched to my content and I get paid when people click through). My homepage has had a BUPA banner advert on the bottom, on and off now for about 2 months! Will NHS Trusts be allowed to promote themselves on the internet like this? The consultation document suggests that advertising on TV and Cinema will be unlikely but what about internet advertising, especially as this could be a much better way of reaching particular target groups and could be focused by geography as well?

5. Don’t forget the Shadows.

Finally, when all is said and done, local word of mouth promotion is still likely to be the most powerful method, but only if Trusts actively embrace it. How many Trusts routinely run patient follow-up programs to solicit feedback and, as a by-product, promote themselves further? Also how many Foundation Trusts have membership advocate programes underway? Thirteen thousand local people, singing from the same hymn-sheet sounds a powerful way to re-position and strengthen a Trusts place in a local market. This shadow marketing activity is likely to be increasingly important.

Steve

www.stevepashley.co.uk