RCGP

At the RCGP, I designed and delivered a plan that highlighted workforce and workload issues in primary care as the political parties started to consider their General Election Manifestos. I designed a plan to meet media and influencing KPIs, taking into account organisational objectives.

I assessed our relationships with key political targets and found that the chair met rarely and briefly with the primary care minister and there was no direct contact with the Secretary of State for Health and Care, Victoria Atkins, or her shadow, Wes Streeting.

I then reviewed key points in the College’s and parliamentary calendar to assess a timeline. Then, I identified unpublished data with news value in an annual survey of members and paired it with policy asks to create a three-step campaign, with the most powerful story to go live at our annual conference.

First, I secured an exclusive in The Times about the impact of the cost-of-living crisis on patients and GPs, paired with case studies, which coincided with a Council meeting. This timing would serve to influence our relationship with council members, as well as other key audiences.

I created a second news item specifically with an exclusive for The Guardian, identifying soaring numbers of GPs concerned about increasing risks to patient safety and the subsequent need to create a national patient safety alert system for primary care.

The key calendar item was our annual conference. I coproduced the chair’s speech – and designed a news story for it, selling this story exclusively into The Times, via it’s Whitehall editor.

The headline warned that ‘no political party had a credible plan for primary care yet’.

It published as intended on the first day of the conference. Then later in the day, when all the senior team were either networking or giving presentations – I received a call from health ed Kat Lay who asked me to respond to a highly critical op ed by Wes Streeting and an associated teaser news story. I sent a team of colleagues out to the floor to collect SMT, and crafted our response to Wes’ statement. While he was initially angry with our warning, this pushed us past the door, and we were then invited to brief him directly for the first time.

Wes went onto challenge Victoria Atkins in parliament on GP workload and workforce pressures and then pledged to give a greater share of the primary care budget to primary care in his manifesto. Since then, he has adopted various RCGP policies. This is an enormous success for the primary care sector, brought about by good quality strategic planning and strong media management.