The Durham Dales Health Federation (DDHF) is an innovative, forward-thinking NHS organisation that provide health services to patients and GP practices across County Durham.
DDHF has different audiences it needs to communicate with, and they identified this as an area they did not have in house expertise on.
I did some discovery days with the management team, to understand exactly what the organisation does, what it wants to do in the future, and who are the key players.
For each audience – patients, GP practices, commissioning groups and staff through internal communications – we talked about how the relationships work currently, what each sides’ priorities are, and how the relationships could develop in the future.
Our organisation has changed drastically in the 5 years we’ve been operating. There are three distinct audiences – individual patients, GP practices and commissioning groups.
Dave Hall, DDHF Operations Director in 2019
Rob’s work has helped us improve our communications both helping us focus on our key messages, and presenting them in ways that suit the priorities of our audience.
Knowing the state of play and understanding the desired direction of travel helped me create aims and objectives as part of an overall strategy.
There were some quick wins to be had – regular staff newsletters, templated presentations and letterheads to make professional documents easy for everyone to create – through to more involved pieces like shaping data reports that highlighted key trends in a visually engaging way.
A public awareness campaign aimed at helping patients understand DDHF’s work, and their role in providing health services was a longer piece of work, including a website refresh, social media advertising and press liaison.
To help commissioning groups better understand DDHF’s business model and innovative ways of work, research through extensive interviews went into creating case studies that tell the story of some of the Federations most groundbreaking achievements.