20 July 2017
Our Communications Manager Zoe Trinder-Widdess describes her work to build a culture of good quality communications in our local health sector.
Often communication is at best an afterthought, and at worst an annoyance. Many consider it to be something that anyone can do on top of their day job. Obviously I am biased, but I believe that to do communications well takes time and more than a little skill.
While I would love to see more investment in communication professionals across our health and care sector, that’s very obviously not going to happen. So through my work at CLAHRC West and Bristol Health Partners, I have set out to develop a more communications savvy culture, where we’re maximising what we’re already doing and doing it just that little bit better.
I enjoy sharing my skills and knowledge with colleagues and collaborators. At the formal end of things, I run two regular training courses as part of the CLAHRC West training programme. One, ‘Writing for a lay audience‘ is on writing in plain, accessible language, underpinned by the principles of the campaign for plain English. The other is ‘How to win at Twitter’, for those people who perhaps have a Twitter account but haven’t quite got to grips with how to make the most of it. Both courses have proved very popular and successful.
To take the plain language work even further, we have set up a plain language panel to review our research summaries. This group of ten members of the public regularly feedback on our summaries and other communications.
I also encourage my colleagues at CLAHRC West to get more hands on with our corporate communications. Some have joined our small but effective Twitter group, who help me look after our @CLAHRC_West account every day. A larger quorum contributes to our bi-monthly communications group, where we discuss and plan our communications activity as a team.
The Health Networks Communications Group, which I chair and run, meets quarterly and brings together many local communications leads, from organisations like the West of England Academic Health Science Network and Clinical Research Network (CRN), as well as from academic research groups and partner communications teams. This is a vital forum for sharing what’s going on more broadly in the sector, best practice, and opportunities for collaboration. This has caught the eye of NIHR’s central communications team: our most recent meeting was attended by the CRN’s national communications lead who wanted to find out more.
When it comes to my day job of disseminating research, I evangelise Altmetric. It allows authors to see where their paper is being shared in the digital realm: on social media, news websites, blogs and the grey literature. It can lead you very quickly to new people who are interested in your work. It’s also a good measure of the interest in a paper, and some strategic tweeting to the right people can quickly improve a paper’s score.
It’s vital to understand where research is being picked up and who’s interested in it, especially for organisations like CLAHRCs, where having quick and real world impact is so key. We believe Altmetric will become an important performance indicator for research, so much so that we reported our papers’ scores back to NIHR in our annual report.
But I think the most convincing argument is to show people what can happen when we do make an effort to do communications well. At CLAHRC West, we now have a well-developed suite of communications products and a robust strategy for getting our work out to the right people. This has led to many things, from articles on blogs like the Mental Elf, to finding new collaborators for future projects, to new funding bids, including a possible ambitious video project with HealthTalk.
When people see tangible results that have flowed directly from good quality, well-thought out communications activity, they get it. It’s not just about clicks, likes and retweets. It can actually lead to real-world action.