The client

Lancashire and South Cumbria NHS Foundation Trust is a long-standing, loyal client with Creativeworld. The Trust provides health and wellbeing services across the full county, which covers a population of approximately 1.8 million people. These services encompass community nursing, health visiting and a range of therapy areas, including healthy lifestyle, mental health, giving up smoking, services for young people and support for patients with learning disabilities.

Part of the Trust’s offering is ‘QuitSquad’ – a free, quit smoking service available to help anyone over the age of 12. This service provides guidance on the stop smoking products available and support on changing routines and behaviour, over a 12 week program. You can either self-refer or be referred via a GP and the service includes face-to-face visits from NHS professionals to ensure accountability and strengthen support for individuals where needed.

The brief

The Trust chose to work with Creativeworld once again to utilise our support in running an effective, regional quit smoking campaign; this follows the first phase of the campaign, alongside other successful health marketing and communication services we have provided the Trust with in the past, examples of which you can view HERE and HERE.

As QuitSquad encourages self-referrals as well as through GP surgeries, advertising goals are two-fold; to gain visibility with all smokers across Lancashire directly and educate health professionals to promote and refer patients to the QuitSquad service.  The Trust’s main objectives for the second phase of the campaign running from Spring – September 2021 is to raise brand awareness by increasing a number of areas – registrations and referral numbers, smokefree promises, App downloads and social media engagement.

In addition, Creativeworld were tasked with creating communication tools to address a particularly problematic demographic of smokers in Lancashire; pregnant women. As found in 2019/20 Lancashire County Council research, “In the Lancashire-12 area, the proportion of pregnant women known to be smokers at the time of delivery (12.8%) is still significantly higher than the England average (10.4%).” When women smoke or inhale second hand smoke during pregnancy, they are limiting the oxygen supply to the baby, making its heart work faster and exposing it to harmful toxins.

The importance of communicating to pregnant women who smoke about QuitSquad’s service to support them in smoking cessation, is very much justified in the shocking facts and figures reported by government agency Public Health England in their stopping smoking Health Matters Guidance, which states that; “Smoking during pregnancy causes: 2,200 premature births, 5000 miscarriages and 300 perinatal deaths each year in the UK”.

Our solution

As such an important issue to address, Creativeworld are passionate about helping the Trust achieve successful campaign results for QuitSquad and are confident that our health marketing expertise gained from many years’ experience in the health sector will enable us to fulfil their requirements.

We carried out research to further identify key problematic demographics for the campaign. In addition to pregnant women, we honed in on developing campaign elements to target smokers in the South Asian community, as well as smokers in routine/manual jobs, alongside the wider aim of getting the message out to all smokers in Lancashire.

To effectively show the target audience the benefits of registering with QuitSquad, we developed real-life case studies in the form of short animated videos, sharing the stories of real people in the local area who have given up smoking as a result of the service. We facilitated interviews with 4 individuals to capture their stories and subsequently developed relatable animated videos and voiceover recordings, utilising actors where needed, to portray these people and their positive quitting experiences.

Additionally, we created a host of other supporting campaign elements, incorporating on and offline media methods to maximise reach and visibility via multiple touchpoints which we knew the target audience would be exposed to. We produced radio adverts for airing on local stations Rock FM and Asian Radio, also utilising the case study voiceovers to provide campaign consistency, as well as printed posters, pull-up banner stands and promotional items including stress balls and mouse mats. The promotional products were particularly aimed at heath professionals; a simple branded mouse mat on a desk acts as a daily reminder of the key details about QuitSquad, to equip GPs and nurses with the information they need to encourage patient referrals and therefore, play their part in supporting the overall campaign objectives.

At Creativeworld, we have a wealth of knowledge enabling us to help all departments and areas of the healthcare sector with marketing and communications requirements, from large health campaigns, to staff engagement and patient communications, so if you need help solving medical marketing challenges, speak to our marketing for the health sector experts – contact us here or call 01282 858200.