NHS care.data trials shun marketing

NHS England is eschewing marketing to promote trials of the controversial care.data scheme, instead getting GP practices to contact patients individually to warn them their personal medical data will be shared unless they opt out.
The move follows one of the most spectacular marketing cock-ups in recent years when the NHS launched a nationwide door-drop campaign only for it to be buried under piles of other leaflets.
The contract for the campaign was awarded to The Leaflet Company and delivered by Royal Mail over a three-week period between January and February last year. It was later revealed that the final bill for the initiative topped £1.3m.
After figures were released that claimed only a third of UK households had remembered seeing the leaflet – ironically headlined “Better information means better care” – a bitter row ensued, with the door-drop industry being blamed for the cock-up.
But at the time, one specialist blamed the “crap creative, which had about as much cut-through as a butter knife”. It then emerged that NHS England had ignored advice issued by a government body that the campaign was “not fit for purpose”; it had responded by saying it was too late to pull the leaflet as it was already at the printers.
Now, practices in NHS Blackburn with Darwen Clinical Commissioning Group will be the first of the four test areas to launch patient communications at the end of this month.
The extraction of patient data will not begin until patient communications have been evaluated by the national data guardian Dame Fiona Caldicott, but once approved extractions of identifiable data could start as early as September.
NHS Somerset and West Hampshire have said they will begin in September, and, while three areas of Leeds have not confirmed when they will start testing communications, they are thought to be aiming for September.