Images of a cash-strapped NHS don’t quite seem to fit with social media, especially given the ever increasing workload on healthcare professionals providing little time to engage. However, a community on Twitter has started taking the topic on and there is a great deal of exciting discussion happening. While we know NHS social media does not mean (see the Facebook ‘lying down game’), the #nhssm community does offer suggestions of what it could mean…
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Posts Tagged ‘NHS’
In defence of healthcare communications
Monday, July 19th, 2010Our blog post last week ‘NHS White Paper: What the patient-centric approach means for healthcare communications’ ignited some debate on Twitter which we want to respond to. You can see the tweets people sent about the post on the page itself and our thoughts on these below.
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NHS White Paper: What the patient-centric approach means for healthcare comms
Tuesday, July 13th, 2010Press coverage around the publication of the NHS White Paper has been at best skeptical of the coalition’s reforms and at worst damning. Regardless of your opinion however, there is one point on which all must accept… that people are taking more responsibility for their own health, and that empowering patients – chiefly through choice – is a predictable and necessary course. For healthcare communications, this is highly significant. If patients are empowered to make decisions, who will inform and educate them about these decisions?
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2010 Communiqué awards: A reminder of the impact and potential healthcare comms can have
Tuesday, July 13th, 2010Never has the saying ‘perception is reality’ been more true for healthcare communications than it is today, particularly given the publication of the NHS White Paper and its focus on outcomes and choice for all. Everyone is a potential stakeholder and the stakes are high. Each year the Communiqué awards commend excellence and best practice and we are reminded how healthcare communications can meet these challenges and deliver real improvements in healthcare information dissemination, provision and choice.
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We’re becoming an ‘appy nation
Thursday, July 1st, 2010It seems that no business is truly innovative unless they have a novel way of reaching out to their customers. Recently, Apple’s iPhone applications have opened up a new world of reference tools, games and ways to interact with each other. However, apps in the health space are a more exciting and potentially life saving prospect with medical reference guides, diagnosis tools and live GP consultations (coming to an iPhone near you soon).
Pharma ventures into iPhone apps
Wednesday, June 9th, 2010Yesterday GSK announced the forthcoming launch of CancerTrialsApp – touted as “the first free geolocating cancer clinical trials application” for the iPhone and iPad. Last week Pfizer also announced they are developing an app that allows easy communication between the company and healthcare professionals. So how might these examples encourage cautious and/or unconvinced pharma execs of the value of apps?
Could doctors looking at your Facebook improve treatment?
Thursday, June 3rd, 2010Are healthcare professionals looking at your Facebook page? The most likely answer is ‘no’, since GPs, nurses, pharmacists and other healthcare professionals (HCPs) are busy enough as it is without wanting to look up their patients on the internet. However, doctors in the UK are now being encouraged by NICE to ask patients probing questions about how much they drink. If doctors are rewarded for meeting targets, what is to stop them from looking at Facebook or running Google searches for patients they are most concerned about?
How does pharma respond to supermarket cancer drugs?
Monday, May 24th, 2010Last week ASDA announced that its in-store pharmacies will sell cancer drugs, such as Sutent, Iressa and Nexavar, at a heavily discounted not-for-profit price. Several other supermarkets followed suit. Strangely, this means ASDA and others are in ‘competition’ with the NHS, or at least opposed to the workings of the NHS. This obviously has implications for the pharma industry. A logical assumption is that if patients begin to pay for their own treatment, they will have questions about the cost of the drugs, rather than the NHS footing the bill. Yet how can pharma respond to patients’ concerns given the ban on directly communicating to them about drugs at risk of being promotional?
Online networks for HCPs booming
Thursday, April 29th, 2010The healthcare marketing bods on Twitter are all getting excited about news that Doctors.Net saw record levels of doctor engagement last year with 25 million unique web sessions in 2009. This is largely owed to discussion forum activity on swine flu, and the trust doctors have in the site as a closed network. So what else is out there, and what are the opportunities for communications activities?
Self care campaign: Now or never?
Wednesday, March 31st, 2010According to the recent report by the Self Care Campaign group, half of the £20 billion shortfall in NHS funding over the next five years could be saved from a shift in behaviour towards self-care rather than reliance on GPs. It’s clear this is the direction healthcare is heading, but how far have we come and where will this journey take us?
