MESsocial Engagement Advent Calendar

T’is the season of festive engagement! MESsocial will each day be gifting engagement thoughts and tips via our Pinterest Advent Calendar located here or feel free to click on Simon our Project Manager above!

Everything from Prezis, Thinglinks, videos and infographics to whet your engagement appetite and help your engagement drive for 2014.

If you have any questions or queries about Membership engagement, Patient experience and membership recruitment. please feel free to contact us at james.lim@membra.co.uk or on twitter at @MESsocial 

What the NHS can learn from British Asians in football.

Equality and diversity are not one and the same. One deals with making sure everyone is treated fairly and afforded the same opportunities, the other deals with difference, which could mean a cultural or religious difference which diversifies an individual or individuals from a majority group. In a health context, when spoken in the same breath as equality, it should be about recognising and valuing individual as well as group differences.

Legislatively speaking, Britain is much further ahead than other countries. In terms of “equality”, the passing of the Equality Act 2010 and the Equality Duty 2011, there is now legislation that is making the public, communities and organisations sit up and stake their claim for supporting and maintaining Equality rights. As a British born Chinese having studied sports in the UK,  I have always had an eye on equality issues for minority groups and have seen the varying levels of engagement these groups have within their communities and how it has evolved over time.

Get involved in the MES annual NHS & 3rd sector Midlands Networking event -19th November

“A great networking event to share ideas, thoughts and questions on the NHS.  Learn how to inform your engagement and understand your members better through collaboration and innovation.”

MES will be hosting its annual Midlands Networking event with University Hospitals Coventry and Warwickshire NHS Trust. Built on the success of our previous  networking events, this will be the fourth time MES will be in the region and the second time this year.

When : 19th November 2013, 9.30 am – 15.30 pm

Who : This free event is for all NHS and 3rd Sector staff involved in membership management, patient experience, communications and community engagement.

What :The event will be a chance for attendees to get together and explore:

• Engaging with and understanding your members
• Patient Experience
• Using Demographics to inform your engagement

Cost : Totally Free! A buffet lunch will be served on the day so if you have any dietary requirements please state this when reserving your space for the day.

Interested? Places are limited so please email elouise.smith@membra.co.uk with your name and job title or alternatively, book through here.

In the meantime feel free to browse our blog for previous engagement articles on the topics above.  You can also follow us on twitter at @MESsocial in the build up and on the day to get your opinions across and to read about all the views and debates during the event.

MES NEWS – NEW CLIENTS

MES is delighted to welcome Oxford University Hospitals and University Hospitals Southampton NHS Foundation Trust as our latest NHS membership database clients. The whole team is looking forward to working with the Trust over the next few years.

#MESV7 Launch – Build up to MES Version 7 release.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

This week MES is gearing up for the launch of Version 7 of its NHS membership database, our flagship product which is used by every single type of NHS provider organisation and even the only specialist learning and disability trust in the country, Calderstones Partnership NHS Foundation Trust.

Over 130 NHS Trusts currently use our NHS membership database and we hold nearly 1.5 million member records- a responsibility we take very seriously. Version 7 allows for even greater and more meaningful 2-way communication with patients, carers and staff members – chiming with the language of engagement and involvement so dominant in the NHS in 2013. Indeed we would like to think that in our own small way, we have contributed to this conversation these past 8 years which you can view in our joint monitor report and latest bulletin.

To date our system has been developed and based on the contribution of our clients and Version 7 is no different, aiming to further bridge the engagement gap between the NHS and the public with better tools and functionality based on actual “on-the-ground” experience.

In the build up to its formal release, we here at @MESsocial want to make sure you do not miss out on its exciting new features so you can follow #MESV7 for all the latest updates and highlights from the system. Recently we unveiled a “Governors at a glance” infographic using the new ACORN features in Version 7 to show important stats extracted from our data banks and will be posting more details under #MESV7.

Watch this space!

MES NEWS – NEW CLIENT

MES is delighted to welcome Nottinghamshire Healthcare NHS Trust  as our latest NHS membership database client, The whole team is looking forward to working with the Trust over the next few years.

More examples of Social Media Friendliness in the NHS Part 3 : Further Examples.

Recently MES did a post on how to become social media friendly within the NHS and gave examples of existing social media friendliness in the NHS. This stemmed from research by MHAdegree.org on the “Top 50 social media friendly hospitals” in the United States.  They did this by gathering social media stats using the number of followers on their respective platforms and the amount of activity on each platform to calculate a score.

In our first post,  we posed the question if such a study was to be conducted within the NHS, what would it look like?.  We reported that there were some very good examples of social media friendliness already prevalent, with some NHS organisations already actively engaging in a variety of platforms and developing a presence in their chosen mediums.

Through our research analysis, where we analysed the level of activity and responsiveness of social media in the NHS, it is clear that a culture of using social media within the NHS is growing and the public is benefiting from this bridge of communication and transparency. It is still early days for NHS Clinical Commissioning groups, but they are pushing their digital engagement forward with open platforms such as blogs (which are included in our examples) to collect valuable feedback and knowledge to inform their public involvement and collaborative partnerships.

We have added more examples of social media friendliness to our list which you can again view through our thing link below. Click here to view our first examples of social media friendliness which was in our first post.   As our list grows, it is possible that we might undertake the same research as done in the United States previously mentioned to produce a similar list either at the end of the year or the beginning of next year as a great tool to show great examples of social media friendliness in the NHS.

If you have a good example please do let us know by contacting @messocial or responding to #NHSsocial , we will be keen to add it.

Click the image below to view our further examples in Thinglink.  

Click here to view our first examples of social media friendliness which was in our first post.

James is a Business Development Officer at Membership Engagement Services.

He can be contacted here or via  MES’s Linkedin company page here.

MES Engagement in the NHS – Interactive Guide

Summer may be nearing its end, but for the NHS, the gears set in motion with the Health and Social Care Act are finally beginning to click. The Clinical Commissioning Group (CCG) landscape is taking shape and the NTDA is finding its feet with NHS Foundation Trust applicants gradually building some momentum in their journeys to authorisation.

MES has been busy over the past year assisting CCGs and Trusts and helping them with their engagement and database services. Last summer we took a snapshot providing figures and stats regarding our work with our clients in 2012.

This year we have updated those figures in a visual guide to show a breakdown of how our MES database clients engage and communicate with members.

How does a Prezi work?

• Click on the triangle in the middle of the screen, directly below the image. Click again each time you want to move to the next slide.
• If you want to go back to a previous slide, click on the triangle to the bottom left of the image.
• Once the prezi has finished you can zoom into areas that most interest you by clicking directly on the image.
• If you want to view the prezi in full screen, click on the More button in the bottom right-hand corner and click ‘Fullscreen’. Press ‘Esc’ on your keyboard to return to the site.

Social media friendliness in the NHS part 2 : examples

Recently we asked for your examples of social media friendliness in the NHS  and we managed to get a great response. We decided to make a list of all examples so far on Thinglink  to promote  the NHS organisations named.

We believe there are other great examples of social media engagement in the NHS and encourage more responses so we can share and encourage further social media engagement within the NHS. If we have missed any examples please let us know and we will update our Thinglink.

Click on the link below to head to our Thinglink, “Good Examples of social media friendliness in the NHS” to view responses and links. Feel free to share the link as well which is here .

How to make the NHS more social media friendly

Last month MHAdegree.org made a list of the “Top 50 Most Social Media Friendly Hospitals for 2013” in the United States. They did this by gathering social media stats using the number of followers on their respective platforms and the amount of activity on each platform to calculate a score. The Mayo Clinic based in Rochester, Minnesota, was ranked top overall and had platforms not just in “Twitter” and “Facebook” but also in “Pinterest and “Flickr”. They used those platforms to communicate health tips to the public through the medium of photos and images allowing the public to “pin” and save their favourite tips.

If such a list were to be created for NHS Trusts, what would it look like? How would NHS Trusts compare with their counterparts across the pond?

Within the NHS Trust landscape, such image platforms such as Pinterest are used sparingly though there are some good examples. Twitter is  fast growing as the defacto platform for social media engagement with the public.  So what if a Trust/ CCG/Healthwatch wished to expand their platforms beyond Twitter?  How do you pioneer your platform for better engagement, participation and relationship building?

Here are some tips as to how you can plan your engagement using social media :