Communications and PR – Unsung Hero Awards

Nomination

Award Category:

Corporate Services

Individual or Team Nomination?

Team

Qualifying Qualities

In these challenging times, nominators were asked to show how the nominee had demonstrated the following qualities:

Exceptional work ethic - going above and beyond their job description, especially in the past 12 months.
Outstanding achievement/s in work or outside of the organisation where relevant.
Drive for innovation and proactive leadership in these challenging times.
High level of interpersonal skills, such as kindness, empathy, loyalty and thoughtfulness to staff and patients.
A resilience considering Covid to their role and to the health and wellbeing of their colleagues.

Nominators Answer

Nominee's story :

South Central Ambulance Service provides a range of emergency, urgent care and non-emergency healthcare services to a population of more seven million people across six counties in central southern England. The emergence of the COVID-19 pandemic led to a year of unexpected challenge and impact for the Trust and it was essential for the communications department to be agile in meeting the needs of the Trust, its patients and staff by developing a clear, coherent but adaptable communications strategy. The communications team at SCAS consists of seven members of staff covering a core area each: Head of department (strategic leadership), marketing, internal communications, external communications, digital design and stakeholder/membership engagement. The team is supported by a communications assistant. When COVID forced many staff to work from home the department needed to find a digital solution so that all face-to-face business could be switched over to virtual communications as quickly as possible. The team used Microsoft Office 365 software to create a new SharePoint intranet called 'The Hub' which, unlike the existing site, could be accessed by staff on any device from anywhere in the world with their regular login details. A dedicated COVID microsite - designed to collate all COVID comms in one area – was built separately in under two weeks and the full intranet was delivered within two months of the first national lockdown announcement. Other than five days of programmer help from Microsoft, the rest of the work was carried out in-house. Part of the public website was redesigned to act as portal for staff and partners to access the new Hub and COVID sites, which meant they could access easily from the home page and log in. The team worked remotely with healthcare professionals to produce Vodcasts for staff and the public, issuing each presenter with instructions on how to set up and light a home studio and provided them with an online portal to submit their movies. An interim membership engagement strategy was developed at the start of the pandemic to ensure that communications and engagement with 17,000 Trust members, the general public and other stakeholders continued to be delivered effectively. An e-Bulletin was developed with regular updates to keep stakeholders informed of what was happening at SCAS and launched a series of films to replace public talks under the banner ‘Your Health Matters’. As part of the engagement programme the team launched a school resource scheme which involved sharing health information via two new and dedicated websites – SCAS Kids and SCAS Youth – for young people throughout the pandemic and created a mascot, 999 Ted the Covid-19 Fighter, to help convey information to young children and provide colouring and drawing competitions. The team also produced more than 9,000 COVID-specific print and digital design items for use in ambulance stations, on vehicles, in control rooms and offices, as well as for use on the public website, intranet and social media platforms. The team also led national communications for the Covid Clinical Assessment Service.