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.

The 12 Days of ChristMES

This year, in lieu of Christmas cards MES have created our very own video carol. We had great fun making the video, and a big thanks goes out to Rob and Simon from the membership services team for putting it together. Everyone at MES would like to wish everyone watching a very merry Christmas and a happy new year!

 

A Very MES Christmas

Coming Soon - the MES Christmas video...

Digital Engagement in the NHS

As we heard in the Chancellor’s autumn statement toParliament earlier this week, austerity clearly isn’t going away anytime soonand budgets across all government departments will remain stretched for theforeseeable future. Yet within the NHS there is still a need to engage with thepublic and that work isn’t free. So in an environment where budgets are beingreduced Trusts need to look at new methods of engagement that are more costeffective. Digital engagement (using a range of digital channels to create aconversation) is one of the ways this can be achieved. As well as the potentialfinancial benefits, a possibly far more important reason for greater use ofdigital engagement is that it allows the NHS to engage with a much wider poolof the population. Traditional methods of engagement can only work so far;digital engagement allows Trusts to reach out to those normally excluded andhear from a wider sector of the public, patients and service users.

Social Media

While social media is becoming increasingly common in theprivate sector, the public sector has been a little slow to catch up. And whilemost NHS organisations have some form of social media presence, it’s not alwaysused in the most effective way. Research conducted by Pew has found that as ofAugust 2012 69% of adults with an internet connection used social media – withFacebook being the most popular. The figures for young people are much higher.As a result it seems obvious that the NHS should be using social media as a keypart of its engagement work with the public, especially when it comes to youngpeople.

At MES we’re trying to make it easier for Trust’s to usesocial media (in this case Twitter and Facebook) by integrating them directlyinto our membership database. So as well as recording traditional communicationmethods they can now record members’ social media contacts. With thisinformation they can then directly communicate with their members via these twosocial networks. Whether it’s updating their Facebook status or tweeting attheir members, it takes just a matter of seconds to use the tools we’ve builtto start the conversation.

Email

But of course digital engagement is not just about socialmedia. Trusts have traditionally sent out newsletters to their members on aquarterly basis and this is a great way of keeping them up-to-date on recentdevelopments. However it can be very costly, especially for the larger Trustswhere their membership can be over 20,000. So many Trusts are moving towards email distribution, or hosting thenewsletter online.  If Trusts are unsureabout uploading a standard PDF to their website there are plenty of servicesavailable (such as scribd.com) where a digital version of a newsletter can becreated that makes the online reading experience much more satisfying.

 

Whichever channels the NHS ends up using, digitalengagement needs to form a central element of how the health servicecommunicates and engages with the wider public over the next few years.

Seasonal Membership Recruitment

 

As we head well and truly into the Christmas period, we are seeing more and more members of the public signing up to become members of Foundation Trusts. This week MES has been working alongside the South Western Ambulance Service NHS Foundation Trust and the Staffordshire and Stoke on Trent Partnership NHS trust with brand new members getting involved from Bristol to Tamworth!