Nottingham University Hospitals NHS Trust
Nottingham University Hospitals NHS Trust
Tiffany Jones is the Director of Communications and External Relations at Nottingham University Hospitals NHS Trust, which has one of the top five teaching hospitals in England and a staff of over 17,000. Here she talks about her role at the Trust, building the team over the last nine months and how they use Vuelio to be more efficient and effective.
I joined Nottingham in November 2019 and inherited a Communications Team with just three staff and but seven vacancies, which was a challenge but meant I have been able to build the team and a new structure, which is a great position to be in. Before that, I had been just down the road at University Hospitals of Leicester NHS Trust for eleven and a half years.
I had used Vuelio with my team at Leicester; I inherited an older version of the system when I joined and eventually we added media monitoring to the system, which completely changed the way we were working. It made the team much more efficient. Before, they were doing Google searches for coverage every day, which didn’t pick everything up and the team wasn’t able to log it all properly. We spoke to our account manager about making our use of Vuelio more adaptive with monitoring, which meant we could run reports directly from the system and tie all of the elements together.
When I came to Nottingham, they had nothing in place, so I had an early conversation with the account manager I had used at Leicester to get it set up. Our Research and Innovation department has its own comms lead so we collaborated to get the maximum benefit of producing the same quality content, which Vuelio allows.
Vuelio is your invisible teammate – it’s the team member that gets the least amount of attention and support, but always performs.
Vuelio is really easy to use and intuitive, it learns as you go. My ultimate aim is to have the reports from Vuelio fed into a dashboard for the Board and my executive colleagues. Vuelio allows you to connect everything, so statements and coverage are linked to their division, and I can run a single report to pull up all our intelligence on that topic. The regular monitoring emails are also really useful for briefing internally.
I’ve recommended Vuelio to a number of people because it creates efficiencies in the team that means that they can focus their time and effort elsewhere. It also shows how much effort we put in to get coverage and where we can start to improve.
The Communications Officers are tasked with publishing nine press releases (between them) a month as standard, and with Vuelio we can see how far they go. For example, there was a young girl who needed a bone marrow donor but couldn’t find a match on the register. Because of COVID, fewer people were coming forward to donate so the family asked us to help out. We got global coverage with that story, which Vuelio allowed us to track and I don’t think we would have been able to see that without it. The story increased donors on the register, and as a result a match was found and the girl is having her life-saving surgery. There’s also an impact on the team – the Communications Officer who issued that story can see the effect her work has, and she can prove it, just by printing out a report from Vuelio.
COVID also meant the team had to largely work from home and we have seen how important it is to keep a log of everything. If a team member is sick but has logged their activities in Vuelio, colleagues can pick up where they left off. For example, they can see if a media enquiry needs answering or has already been dealt with.
