Our regular ‘What Do You Do at DHU’ feature has proven to be very popular with colleagues and those who use our services. It’s a great way to showcase the different roles across DHU, how we all fit together to provide the best possible care for our patients and how we work together with other NHS and health providers. But where do these articles come from?
Well that would be us, DHU’s Communications Team! But who are we and what do we do? We’ll take you behind the scenes!
The Comms Team consists of Head of Communications Sarah Turner-Saint, Senior Communications Advisor Simon Towers and Communications Advisors Jessica Worthington and Ed Sills. Jess has been at DHU for more than seven years, starting as a 111 Health Advisor and knows the organisation inside out. Ed joined three years ago to create a two-person comms team with Sarah arriving in July 2021 to expand the team as DHU grew. Simon completed the comms quartet on a one year’s secondment from Chesterfield Royal Hospital in the New Year.
Sarah said: “Over the past year we’ve done a lot of work on DHU’s own identity. We wanted to make our values clearer so that everyone, from those who work here to those who use our services, know who we are and what we stand for. We have very clear CARE values that were in need of strengthening to give us a recognisable identity and part of what I wanted to do was to make sure our colleagues and health partners were involved in shaping those values.
“Communications is as much about listening and adapting as it is about writing and creating; a message has to be received and understood to have any meaning and we have to make sure that happens. We’re very close to relaunching our values and we can honestly say that it represents everything our colleagues stand for because they have been involved in the conversation, we’ve listened and incorporated as much of that feedback as we could. Involving our people in deciding on what direction we take is so important to a growing organisation.”
As the longest serving member of the team, Jess said: “Communications has changed a lot since I started in the role and it’s much more than simply writing articles like this one for the website. I now focus mainly on engagement which is important for an organisation that is spread out geographically. We all need to feel a part of what DHU is doing so bringing us all together and involving all staff in events, recruitment, conversations, decisions and finding out more about each other makes a big difference.”
Simon added: “We want to make sure that everybody feels part of what we call #OneDHU which is one of the reasons we produce features like this. Whether you work in IT, HR, Finance, a Health Advisor at one of our 111 Advice Centres, a Nurse Practitioner at an Urgent Treatment Centre or part of the procurement team who provide the tools for our colleagues to do their job. By talking to them and writing their stories, we show how proud they are that what they do contributes directly to the care of our patients.
“But it’s more than that. We want to know about the person behind the role which is why we celebrate and share details of the many different cultural festivals, health awareness days, share stories of how some of our colleagues have overcome personal adversity. It all creates interest and shows respect for the diversity of the people who work here rather than simply what they do. None of us work in isolation and we saw from our recent pieces about Ramadan and Easter how people who don’t follow a certain faith, want to know and understand more about those who do.”
The team will also answer media enquiries, promote positive news stories to local media, work very closely with our Health and Wellbeing, HR and clinical teams to ensure our people stay healthy, safe and protected. This means pushing various health messages about vaccination campaigns, how to reduce infection, informing people about where to go for any particular health concern to help ease the pressure on the health system as a whole. It means finding a delicate balance between sharing the correct message in the right way via the most appropriate channels
Ed leads on the digital side, he said: “There are so many different ways to communicate. For example we have a Closed Staff Facebook Group where we can start conversations and share ideas. We create graphics, share photographs of our people, services and patients with their consent of course. We create short health awareness videos, collaborate with health partners on complex campaigns, construct short, informal tweets and produce lengthy, official reports. Finding the right way to speak to reach as many people as we can using a variety of different media.”
“It’s an incredibly varied job,” added Sarah, “that boils down to making sure colleagues, partners and those who use our services can be kept informed and involved. We give a voice to our people to show what they do and how we all work together for you. We explain what you can expect from us, how you can help us to do that more effectively and enable you to ask questions to become part of that same conversation. We feel very privileged to be able to speak to so many exceptional colleagues and look forward to sharing many more of their stories to show you what DHU Health Care is all about.”
Thanks to the Comms Team for telling us about their role and keep your eyes peeled for DHU’s next #WhatDoYouDo.
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