How effective communication can help your practice

Sue Wallis, PCC, gives her top tips to ensure PCNs can be more proactive in their communications

Primary care is hardly out of the news. Patient expectations are rising. Public understanding of the challenges within primary care is often low or non-existent. GP practice staff are working with new team members, often from different practices within primary care networks (PCNs). Patients are being offered appointments with new and often unfamiliar professional roles that better meet their needs. Ways of working are changing with more digital solutions and centralised services.

All these factors highlight the need for proactive and positive communication and engagement within primary care, yet how many GP practices or PCNs have a dedicated communications function? Not many, I guess, as scarce funding is directed towards direct patient-facing roles; more likely, communication is part of someone’s wider job function, and subject to the inevitable pull and push of competing priorities. However, communication has an important role to play in supporting the delivery of services and investing in the time and skills to communicate effectively will play dividends.

Effective communication and engagement can help different groups:

• Primary care staff – to feel integrated within the PCN team and understand each other’s roles and work to a shared purpose.
• Patients – understand the role of the PCN and the challenges faced by the team; be more receptive to the different types of appointments, roles and new ways of working.
• Partners – embrace primary care in the wider community and give leaders a more prominent voice, and greater influence, within the local health and social care system.

So, what can PCNs do to be more proactive? Here are some ideas to get you thinking.

• Think about who you need to reach and how you might reach them – what tools do you have at your disposal within the PCN – website, social media, newsletter, others?
  
• Give some thought to what you want your staff, patients and partners to think, do or feel? Use this thinking to help plan your communications.
  
• Get to know your community partners and work together to engage and communicate with your shared population. This might be parish or town councils, local churches, community groups or schools; many of your partners will have an interest in wellbeing and will be happy to help via their own communication channels.
  
• Understand where your patients go to find stuff out – local Facebook groups, local media, council newsletters?  Then you go there too!
  
• Embrace social media if you haven’t already but be aware it takes time and effort – choose which platforms you will use, set some guidelines to help you work within it and be pragmatic about what you can manage. 
  
• Get a schedule together so that you can plan ahead – content is king, so include a mixture of PCN and practice developments, operational news and health and self-care information.
  
• Value and use your patient participation groups to help plan and engage with patients and test out communications materials – they will help. 

• Understand the benefits of working together as a PCN; make these explicit and share them with your staff, patients and partners. 
  
• Harness and share communications expertise across the PCN to avoid duplication and share the workload – take responsibility for different areas of communication activity.
  
• Most important of all, plan communication activity that is doable, practical and sustainable – try not to over-commit.
  

Try these and see if they help you develop a more robust and proactive approach to your PCN communications.

If you think some pragmatic, practical support to help develop your PCN or practice communications would help contact [email protected].

Sue Wallis has over 30 years’ experience in communications, stakeholder management and large scale change.