Healthcare communications campaign for NHS provider

Client:

Sirona Care & Health CIC

Year:

April 2025

Services:

The Challenge

Sirona Care & Health CIC is the south west UK’s largest NHS provider of community healthcare. With more than 6,000 staff working across 92 sites in Bristol, North Somerset and South Gloucestershire, the organisation plays a vital role in the region’s health and care system.

In April 2024, Sirona asked Future Stories to design and deliver a year-long healthcare communications campaign for its Community Model Development Programme. This wide-ranging internal transformation aimed to standardise and strengthen adult community healthcare services, improve leadership and culture within those services, enhance access and equity, and build closer collaboration with the voluntary and community sector (VCSE). A key component of the programme was the co-creation of a new clinical strategy and outcomes framework.

This work took place against a backdrop of significant operational and cultural pressures. Many frontline staff were dealing with rising demand, persistent vacancies and increasingly complex caseloads. These pressures, intensified by the legacy of the pandemic, made it more difficult to engage staff in long-term transformation. Sirona needed a communications approach that could reconnect teams, support meaningful involvement, and build wider trust across the health and care system.

The Solution

Future Stories created a comprehensive year-long campaign focused on transparency, participation and emotional resonance. Key elements included:

Audience mapping and message targeting: Defining distinct messages for staff, managers, VCSE partners, GPs, commissioners and the public - tailored to their specific motivations, concerns and priorities.
Vision and values narrative: Developing accessible messaging that connected service-level change to the organisation’s overarching vision, supporting staff to understand the ‘why’ behind the programme.
Colleague listening and feedback: Facilitating two-way conversations through face-to-face roadshows across Sirona sites, enabling open dialogue with programme and clinical leaders.
Internal storytelling: Scripting a short, emotive film featuring frontline staff, sharing their motivations for working in healthcare, current challenges and hopes for the future (produced by local partner Guillermo Armero).This helped humanise the need for change and built empathy across the organisation.
Segmented content delivery: Creating tailored newsletters for different directorates (e.g. bedded units, neighbourhood teams, specialist services) to reflect local development work that teams were leading, and increase relevance.
Stakeholder engagement: Developing bespoke presentations and facilitated webinars for GPs, VCSE partners and commissioners – ensuring external voices helped shape the clinical strategy.
Ongoing content development: Produing regular short form video and written updates via internal channels, highlighting staff-led improvements and reinforcing the link between local initiatives and wider strategy.
Clinical strategy support: Working alongside Sirona’s programme team to shape, edit and format the draft clinical strategy, based on extensive feedback gathered throughout the year.
Final asset creation: Advising on the development of an animation to bring the clinical strategy to life and supported its final presentation.

The Outcome

The campaign helped to:

Rebuild connection between frontline staff and the corporate team, showing how frontline work contributes to strategic priorities.
Enable two-way engagement through roadshows, surveys and storytelling - building a bank of staff feedback to inform decision-making.
Shift the tone of internal comms from corporate to collaborative - and from generalised to locally relevant.
Support the delivery of a co-created clinical strategy. This has since been adopted into Sirona’s wider organisational strategy launched in April 2025.

Healthcare communications campaign for NHS provider

The Challenge

The Solution

The Outcome

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