NHS Communications Initiative of the Year Award

HSJ Awards 2024 - NHS Communications Initiative of the Year Award
NHS Communications Initiative of the Year Award
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How to apply

Entries have now closed

Communications is more than just reputation management. Communications and public relations staff are essential in helping NHS organisations engage with patients, local communities, staff and other interested groups including the media and outside organisations. The evidence would suggest, clear and targeted communications can:

  • Have a positive impact on staff morale, wellbeing, retention and recruitment
  • Help patients find the right service for them or support them to better care for their own health
  • Manage a change process, ensuring the right voices are heard so NHS organisations continue to improve
  • Celebrate success to help with the spread and implementation of new initiatives
  • Provide clear and timely information to a range of patient groups using innovative channels to reach them, including social media and other digital channels
  • Enable hard-to-reach population groups to access care or services

These are just some of the potential outcomes. The NHS Communications Initiative of the Year Award is designed to celebrate innovations, ideas and strategies that are making a difference to the way the NHS is communicating.

Judges are looking for initiatives which can show tangible results in landing targeted and valued communications, an innovative approach to communications and a divisive and imaginative strategy.

Eligibility

All NHS organisations, General Practice, primary care and community organisations.

Ambition

  • Describe your communications strategy and any changes you have made to it
  • Share any statistics you have to monitor the effectiveness of your communications strategy
  • What did you set out to achieve? Describe the initiative
  • What were your measures of success, providing detail on the benchmarks used?

Outcome

  • Judges are looking for quantitative evidence of improvements in outcomes for patients or staff as a result of communications and messaging
  • Describe how the initiative was implemented to achieve these results
  • Provide testimonial evidence supporting your work

Spread

  • How has this initiative been rolled out across your organisation?
  • What efforts have been made to share your best practice examples with others in the NHS?
  • Provide evidence to support the sharing of your achievements

Value

  • How has your work contributed to improvements either in patient outcomes, cultural change, public behaviour change or efficiency of the NHS?
  • Judges will be looking for clear examples of the initiative benefiting individuals or the NHS more broadly whether that is staff, patients or any individual NHS organisation
  • Provide evidence where possible that your initiative has had a positive impact on staff, patients or their friends and families

Involvement

  • Describe how the organisation worked with external agencies or other trusts to achieve your outcomes
  • Judges will be looking for direct evidence of a consultative approach ensuring that the base in which changes were made was researched

To find out more

Partnership opportunities:  Sponsorship Sales Team
Awards entry enquiries: Delegate Sales Team
Judging and event management: Awards Support