#ItStartsHere

NHS / Social

NHS Trusts across the UK are suffering from staff shortages in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic and BREXIT.

We worked with Leeds Community Healthcare Trust to help them show people that the NHS is still brimming with exciting career opportunities.

The challenge

Encouraging people to relocate or start their careers in the NHS has proved more difficult over the last two years, with the Nursing Times reporting a 12% increase in the number of ‘missing’ nurses in August of last year compared to just 6 months earlier in March 2021.

Leeds Community Healthcare Trust (LCH) approached us last summer to help them fill a number of crucial roles within their community nursing team, special services team, and their 0-19 department – that’s the team that provide support to families and children from birth, right up until the end of their teenage years.

New nurses were needed to fill roles across the board from neighbourhoods, to schools, to police custody specialists, and 12 months of advertising using their traditional methods had turned up no takers.

The solution

We’ve a long history of working with the NHS to help them recruit new staff, and particularly utilising the power of social media to find those people. For the team at LCH, our creative approach meant a campaign that included video, imagery, GIFs and tailored content to make sure nurses knew where their next career move could be found.

We came up with three campaigns to help target those three key audiences.

For the 0-19 team – #ItStartsHere – a play on both the nature of the work, and the opportunity to truly begin your career when you join the LCH team.

For the neighbourhood nursing team – #ThisIsCaring – reflecting the level of dedication a nurse has to visit patients in their homes every day. If you want a career in care, this is where you’ll find it.

For the specialist nursing teams – #WhereCareComesFirst – in environments where you perhaps thought healthcare did not play a big role, it really does, and you can be part of the team that delivers it.

Our approach included filming in patients’ homes, police custody, nurseries, young offenders institutions and hospitals themselves, as well as individual staff interviews, content writing and asset design to create a series of campaigns that would focus on specific roles and opportunities, to help find those candidates they needed so much.