Would you recommend us to your friends and family?

These days it’s quite common to be asked for feedback from companies whose services you’ve used, you might get an email from Amazon asking if you were happy with your last DVD delivery, or a restaurant might give you a feedback form asking about your meal.  Here at MES we do the same sending out feedback forms to all of our clients on a regular basis.  From April this year the NHS will be expected to do the same thing.  Back in May last year the Prime Minister announced that the so-called “Friends and Family” test would be rolled out across the NHS, with a minimum of 15% patients being asked whether they would recommend the hospital ward they’d visited, or the A&E they’d been treated in to their family and friends.

Braving the Winter Weather

After returning from toasty Australia 2 weeks ago (sadly I mean that literally following the recent bush fires in Tasmania) it is quite a shock to the system getting acclimatised to the brutal British weather. Amy and I lead the membership recruitment team  and spend much of the year travelling the length and breadth of the country, encouraging participation and gathering support from the British public for their local NHS Trust. As a result we are now veterans at braving all weather and delivering recruitment campaigns in the harshest of conditions. Here are our top tips when it comes to being prepared for all eventualities:

Resolutions for 2013

Greetings from MES for the new year to clients, friends, colleagues and followers of our blog.  We hope you all had a good break and are set up nicely for 2013.

Short, sweet and to the point this week.  Following on from our end of year ’12 Days ofChristMES’ message I thought I’d do a bit of crowd-sourcing and see what colleagues’ views were on New Year resolutions.

To say there was some resistance to this ancient tradition is putting it mildly.  There was a lot ‘there is no point’ or ‘I don’t agree with setting resolutions’ [a.k.a ‘my willpower is comical and so I will not set myself up for a guaranteed fall’].  The full uncensored version of one of these kind of comments was:

“I usually never make resolutions, because I am a pragmatic engineer who believes that the Gregorian calendar is just another invention that humans developed in order to organize time, and that there is in fact no such thing as a ‘New Year’. If you want to change something in your life, then get a grip and just do it. Don’t wait around for the new year."

Nice.

Anyway, this may of course be true but I have eeked out a top 10 for your delight (as you read on have the TOTP 1980s theme tune running through your mind, or if you need help, click here and have it playing in the background:

10      Travel more

9        To type the word 'constituencies' correctly on a more frequent basis

8        Stop smoking

7        Start using Twitter

6        Train harder

5        Start my voluntary work

4        Worry less

3        Maintain & grow a healthy adult relationship devoid of drama and selfishness

2        Improve my upper body strength [please could you be more specific MES-er? And if I catch you with any improved lower body strength you will be dealt with harshly and swiftly!]

And coming in a No. 1, winning the title for its total lack of commitment and its impressve vagueness....

 

1

“I may do some stuff, I may embark on some ventures, who knows.  I'd kind of like to start looking at property this year, but that's a nice casual idea, not hard-and-fast resolve.”

We’ll provide weekly progress reports throughout 2013 on each of them.

Actually we won't.  If you have any you’d like to share with us why not tweet us @MESSocial ?

Have a good week ahead everyone.