The War Of The Roses

Those of you who were up late last night may have noticed, or even participated in a ground breaking twitter discussion. NHS Leeds and NHS Manchester jumped out of their corporate suits and became human. The transformation was amazing to watch – I have long since felt that trusts are too robotic on twitter, they "spew out" health promotion tweets with no engagement or humanity, and that's if they even tweet on a regular basis.
 

The chat started with a bit of banter between NHS Leeds and NHS Manchester regarding the war of the roses, it seems that the houses of York and Lancaster still hold onto some rivalry, the conversation then attracted some attention and both trusts, instead of keeping quiet, joined in and conversed with twitter users.
 

The reason I believe that this is an important event is that it is the first evidence that I have seen that NHS Trusts are real people on Twitter, with real personalities and real tweets. I think that in order to be successful on Twitter communities need to be developed and a key way of doing this is through engagement. Trusts need to have real conversations with people to build relationships, just like they do in the outside world and yes sometimes these conversations need to be about nothing of particular importance … however the conversations themselves are of vital importance. The key is to build up trust and rapport, just as we would with our real life patients, and then when an issue crops up, a situation arises or someone is in need of help or support they remember you and how you were with them and this is most important in healthcare. Instead of being a poster you become a walking talking source of information about healthcare and your trust – pretty powerful stuff.
 

So to all the NHS Trusts out there: watch and learn from NHS Leeds and NHS Manchester and start to really engage with people and yes, keep tweeting the health promotion tweets – but I know who I am more likely to listen to and retweet... the trust that engaged with me as a person!
 

Thank you NHS Leeds and NHS Manchester, keep up the good work and I hope that others will follow your lead.

Blog by @Agencynurse