Health Trainers and GPs – Making the Links

Background

Since 2006 NHS Health Trainers (HTs) have provided personal health support by working in the communities in which they live to develop patient health improvement plans to overcome individual barriers to healthier lifestyles. Although the programme has been very successful in many areas, evidence from the HSJ suggested that that less than a quarter of those receiving HT services were referred through their GP. The need was therefore identified to raise the profile of HT’s within primary care settings.

Approach

HM Partnerships led a social marketing project and commissioned an agency (Corporate Culture) to deliver a targeted social marketing campaign to engage GPs and practices across Cheshire and Merseyside in the HT agenda. In depth insight work was carried out to find out more about GPs, practice nurses and HT’s, and the existing level of awareness of the HT agenda, prior to the campaign.

Insight

Five of the eight Cheshire and Merseyside were engaged in the insight phase of the work, this built a national and local picture and identified opinions and views of the service from GPs and other key partners.

The key recommendations that came from the insight were:

• To develop a consistent look and feel core campaign, with a framework that would enable flexibility locally
• To develop a suite of consistent materials for GPs, Nurses, Patients and Practice Managers
• Use a concise and short referral form – one was developed as part of the social marketing – to carry the project brand

Social Marketing Resources

A patient facing leaflet

This would give members of the public a good general overview of the services offered by the HT service. It would include a case study (where appropriate), methods of self referral and other generic information including contact details.

HT Powerpoint presentation

To be used by Health Trainers themselves in delivering statistics, examples of current practice and services to the primary health setting, with a particular focus for practice meetings and protected learning events. Utilising the imagery from the brand name and the images used by the campaign, this would add relevance and further act as an engagement and information sharing tool. This template is flexible and allows, the images to be changed and images used from the ‘image bank’ that is provided with the finished resources. This would enable the HTs to use those images most relevant to their services e.g. weight management.

GP referral pad

To be used to ease the referral process to the local service, this would contain all the relevant information needed by a HT, but still be simple enough to not add extra work to a busy GP. It would also include some general information about Health Trainers and be adaptable so that it can be tailored to meet the specific needs in an area.

Further Information

The final developed resources are available for use by any HT service or PCT, with personalisation and logos and contact details being added.

For more details or for copies of the set of resources please contact info@hmpartnerships.co.uk