The Someone like me campaign has won not one, but two awards.
The recruitment campaign, which aims to get local people into healthcare roles across the North London Mental Health Partnership, won the Improving Outcomes: Management Team Award at the 2023 Healthcare Honours. It was also the Gold Winner in the Chartered Institute of Public Relations’ Healthcare and/or Wellbeing Campaign.
It is a piece of creative communication and engagement campaigning that we are all so proud of at Pinch Point Communications. Working in partnership with the teams at the Barnet, Enfield and Haringey Mental Health NHS Trust (BEH – part of the North London Mental Health Partnership) is central to its success.
People working in mental health, with some of the most vulnerable members of society, told us their stories, shared their motivations and generously welcomed us into their working worlds.
We met nurses, doctors, speech and language therapists, managers, psychologists, counsellors and so many other kinds of careers.
We saw and heard amazing accounts of how kindness and small interventions can turn someone’s life around. “The first thing I say is ‘how can I help,’” someone said to me at the start of the campaign, “and often the person will say, ‘no one has ever asked me that before’. It is heart breaking.”
By telling the stories and the lived experience of those working in mental health, we have been able to highlight the roles and opportunities for many different and varied careers, all of which will change someone’s life. We ran a social media campaign, we made films, an animation, used photographs and innovative design to provide content and we held an open day where more than 160 people came.
At BEH the vacancy rate fell from 12% to 8%. Yes, this was a creative campaign. I am proud of the design and very proud of all the team who developed it. And now we are working with the North London Mental Health Partnership to recruit more mental health professionals into the prison services.
Someone like me is a life changing campaign, where someone has a new job; and someone waiting for mental health support does not have to wait so long.
That is something to be doubly proud of.