Communications in health care improvement - a toolkit Increase your understanding and use of communications to better plan, implement and spread your improvement work

May 2015

What you'll learn

Understand how to reach and win the support of the people who are key to your project’s success.
Assure yourself, and demonstrate to others, that you are following best practice in communications.
See how communications can sustain interest in your project and encourage the spread of innovation and new ways of working.
Identify the materials and stories about your project that may help in recommissioning or seeking further funding.

Evidence indicates that considering communications from the beginning to the end of a project could be an important factor in the spread of successful health care improvement.

By working through the four sections in this toolkit you can reassure yourself that you are following best practice at every point in your project and not missing any important steps. You can also access individual tools, templates and support materials, such as audience mapping or creating messages, as and when needed.

Section 1: Planning for success

This section is all about getting the right foundations in place at the beginning of a project.

There are three parts to this section:

Build your communications team
Identify and prioritise your audiences
Create a simple communications strategy

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Section 2: Getting started

This section guides you through how to take the strategic planning from section one and turn it into action.

By working through this section you will:

Create messages for your audiences
Choose the right communications channels
Create a simple communications plan

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Improvement comms toolkit section 2 image

Section 3: Sustaining interest

This third section of communications in health care improvement offers guidance on how to sustain the interest and engagement of your audiences.

By working through this section you will:

be presented with tips and ideas on how to keep your audiences interested and on board with the project
understand the power of storytelling in health care improvement
be able to evaluate and communicate progress to date, and to prepare your communications for the final project stage on spread.

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Section 4: Spreading your work

This section focuses on how communications can help spread the learning and ideas generated by your project.

By working through this section you will:

create a simple communications plan to support your spread work
learn the principles of extending your influence by engaging with networks and policy makers
learn how communications can help build a case for further funding of your improvement work.

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Communications toolkit: the evidence

This toolkit draws on the evidence available around communications and its relation to health care improvement, and has used the emerging insights to inform its content and structure.

As a useful summary, an evidence scan, based on 477 empirical research studies and published by the Health Foundation, highlights the following communications approaches as important in the spread of good practice in health care improvement.

View the evidence