Social marketing for the NHS.
By The Team 24 Sep 2009.
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I attended the HSJ’s social marketing conference recently where Julie Alexander, head of social marketing and health-related behaviour at the Department of Health outlined her view on the impact of social marketing. She referred to the Change4Life programme which is ‘out there’, but said it was too early to evaluate success in terms of marked behavioural change.
Social marketing is altruistic marketing. It exists not for the profit of the marketer, but for the benefit of the people it is designed to reach.
Karl Milner, director of communications and public relations for NHS Yorkshire and Humber, was involved in designing the NHS’s world-class commissioning framework for competency 3, which measures engagement capabilities, of which social marketing plays a key role. To be considered ‘world class’ in social marketing, primary care trusts must redesign their services to prioritise the patient experience and prove that this change has taken place.
Ray Lowry, senior lecturer at Newcastle University supported this view giving fantastic examples of how service redesign is core to effective social marketing. Women in Newcastle, for example, only began using their cervical screening service when it was redesigned to become “feminised” and “personalised”. The public will change their behaviour once the service itself had changed.
I came away from the event with an impression that NHS communicators are going to have to work extremely hard to tie up the work that delivery teams are undertaking with their social marketing strategies. The short term achievements of social marketing such as motivated staff, appropriate use of services, early detection of conditions and less demand on service overall will serve to encourage this approach.
A whole system that changes behaviours and attitudes throughout the entire marketing cycle is world class social marketing.
