I’d like to hope that most readers working in healthcare companies already understand why it matters to work closely with patient advocates across project lifecycles, product launches and strategy development. But for anyone encountering this properly for the first time, it is worth starting with the basics: who is a patient advocate, and what do they actually do?

A patient advocate is someone with lived experience of one or more health conditions who raises awareness, challenges assumptions and helps make visible the needs of people who may not be able, or know how, to speak up for themselves.

They often work closely with health organisations to provide insight, contribute to advisory boards, support research, review content, speak to media and bring the power of personal experience to campaigns. More than that, they help make sure healthcare organisations are acting in ways that genuinely reflect patients’ needs, rather than what teams assume those needs to be.

So how can companies work well with patient advocates and avoid the obvious pitfalls? How has the landscape changed? And what does “good” look like in practice?

To get into these questions, I spoke to Trishna Bharadia: one of the most experienced and respected advocates and engagement specialists in the industry.

Trishna is a multi-award-winning patient advocate, patient engagement specialist and founder of The Spark Global. Through the consultancy, she works with pharma, CROs, med comms agencies, publishers, charities, digital health companies and patient groups to bring lived experience into healthcare, research and medicines development. She also lectures on patient engagement at the Centre for Pharmaceutical Medicine Research, King’s College London, ensuring that the next generation of pharmaceutical executives are well-versed in the what, why and how of working with patients.

Trishna’s advocacy started in 2008, when she was diagnosed with relapsing multiple sclerosis at 28. Her first experiences of treatment were, in her words, “not optimal”. She and her family had to push for information, support and appropriate care, and she saw how much a patient’s experience could be shaped by their ability to fight their corner. Trishna, whose heritage is South Asian, had English as a first language, some health literacy and family support. Many others do not. “I realised that actually many people in my community don’t have that,” she told me, “and aren’t necessarily understanding even the need to advocate for yourself, or how to go about doing it.”

Trishna got involved in voluntary work with MS organisations including the MS Society, MS Trust and Asian MS. A move to an MS specialist centre, led by a clinician who believed in patient empowerment, helped build her confidence. Speaking at education sessions led to speaking at pharma offices, then conferences. “It just snowballed,” she said.

Her advocacy work now centres on helping organisations involve patients properly across projects, disease areas and systems — from clinical trial materials and plain language summaries to advisory boards, congresses, campaigns and patient authorship.

So, according to Trishna, and reflected in wider guidance on meaningful patient engagement, how can health comms leaders find the right advocates, work with them well and build campaigns that are stronger because of that involvement?

1. Start with the community, not the campaign idea
   The strongest collaborations begin before the creative route is fixed. Map who already has trust in the community: charities, support groups, specialist nurses, community leaders, online creators, researchers and advocates with established experience. Be clear about whose perspective you need and why. A high-profile advocate may help with reach, but they will not necessarily represent newly diagnosed patients, carers, underserved communities or people with more complex access needs.

2. Process matters
   If an agency is running work on behalf of a pharma company, the patient still experiences that agency as part of the company. A vague brief, slow contract, inaccessible format or confusing expenses process does not feel like background admin. It tells the patient how seriously their contribution is being taken. Put the basics in place early: clear roles, fair payment, realistic timelines, accessible formats and a simple route for raising concerns.

3. Ask, don’t assume
   Good practice starts with asking about accommodations and adaptations, from travel and meeting breaks to preferred ways of contributing. Some advocates may be best placed to join a workshop; others may add more value through written feedback, content testing, interviews or social media development. Trishna gave the example of needing special assistance at an airport, only for organisers to assume she also needed an accessible hotel room. She did not. Even within one health condition, needs vary hugely. “You can have 10 people with MS in one room,” she said, “and every single one will have different needs.”

4. Recognise nuance
   Companies used to treat “patients” as one broad group, often brought in to validate work near the end. Better engagement is more specific. A newly diagnosed patient, experienced advocate, caregiver, community leader and patient author will bring different expertise. One person cannot represent an entire population, so build a mix of voices around the objective. The same level of segmentation companies apply to HCPs should apply here too.

5. Build engagement into the infrastructure of your projects
   Create processes that involve patient advocates early enough to shape the brief, format, language, asks and follow-up. Do not wait until you’re about to launch to ask advocates to endorse your campaign. Make them part of your project team from the start.

The best campaigns will come from relationships built early, with people who understand the community, can challenge the brief and are given enough context, time and respect to shape the outcome. For health companies, that means finding advocates through trusted networks, being clear about the role you want them to play, paying them properly, building in flexibility and showing what changed because they were involved. That is the difference between using a patient voice and working in partnership with a patient advocate.

🤩 PRInspiration

The ever-creative Specsavers team have smashed it again with this clever campaign that turns a boring health check into a cultural badge of honour. The Testlist, offers over-50s the chance to access exclusive live music events by first taking a free three-minute online hearing screener. Fronted by Groove Armada and built around the insight that the generation that created rave culture is still filling dancefloors today, the campaign reframes hearing health from a sign of ageing to a means of staying connected to the experiences people love.

Breast Cancer Now turned a complex access-to-medicines debate into a deeply emotive visual statement by staging a queue in Trafalgar Square to represent the thousands of people waiting for NHS access to the breast cancer drug Enhertu. Women living with incurable metastatic breast cancer, campaigners and families stood alongside empty pairs of shoes symbolising those who had died before gaining access to the treatment. The campaign quickly picked up traction on social media, and their petition has already got over 74,000 signatures, owing to the power of the striking imagery, patient voices and a clear call to action to put pressure on decision-makers.

📚 I’m reading…

Why comms leaders need to be business leaders first
My July column in PharmaTimes Magazine features an interview with Abigail Epstein, Head of Communications, UK and Ireland, at Takeda, and asks what it really means to add value as a health comms leader in 2026.

Hardware meets high jewellery: introducing the tech-cessory
Fed up of your wearable health tracker ruining your look? Fear not, you can now spend hundreds of pounds to bedazzle it, reports The Times.

📻 I’m listening to…

On The Rox
Roxhill Media has been speaking to top journos to source practical advice for UK PRs, including “Why PRs should get their clients on late-night radio” and “How to pitch personal narratives”.

Uncovering the objective truth in health tech journalism
Host of The Healthtech Podcast, James Somauroo, is joined by Cate Lawrence, Senior Journalist at Tech.eu, to explore what the European healthtech ecosystem actually looks like from the press box, how stories get chosen, what makes a startup worth covering, and why the data gap between innovation and clinical impact remains so wide.

I’ve spent much of the last month on what felt like a UK & Ireland Grand Tour, bouncing between Scotland, Ireland, England and Wales whilst juggling a laptop and unpredictable internet connections. Here’s hoping for fewer hours on motorways throughout the remainder of the summer!

To get some answers, I sought out The PR Futurist himself – aka Stuart Bruce - the PRCA’s official AI partner, an in-demand agency advisor, and one of the best-known voices on AI in PR and corporate affairs.

I spoke to Stuart about where PR teams should actually be using AI today, why many agencies are still only scratching the surface, and what health communicators need to understand about GEO, AI visibility and trust.

1) The best use of AI in PR is not where many teams start

Stuart was clear that content generation is overrated as a use case for AI in PR. Comms people are strong creative writers (and enjoy it!) so the bigger opportunity is using AI to strengthen the thinking around the work: interrogating ideas, stress-testing messages, and spotting missing detail in planning docs and timelines.

Stuart talked about using AI as a ‘critical friend’ for strategic work: asking it what a hostile journalist might question, where the holes are in an argument, or how different outlets might frame a story. In that sense, the value often lies in challenge rather than authorship.

2) Most agencies still have an adoption problem

Stuart’s view is that many organisations say they are using AI internally, but on closer inspection the usage is often shallow: a bit of research here, an occasional prompt there. The result is very different from a business where people at every level are using it regularly to improve their work and save meaningful time each week.

What seems to separate the stronger adopters is their appetite to experiment and to build new habits with AI embedded. For leaders trying to improve adoption rates, Stuart emphasised the importance of training, experimentation and repetition, including simple ideas like a team “prompt of the week” or “prompt of the day”, where everyone tries the same use case and shares what worked. That kind of routine matters because it makes AI part of a team’s working rhythm.

3) The real gains come from workflow, not novelty

Based on the advisory work he’s delivered to dozens of agencies and in-house teams, Stuart told me he’s seeing strong results where AI is used to improve planning and consistency against agreed frameworks - which is especially useful in dispersed teams or those stretched particularly thin.

This doesn’t necessarily mean that agencies need to panic-build a library of bespoke internal tools by next week. Adoption tends to work when AI is built into familiar workflows, backed by training, and treated as behaviour change rather than a shiny tech rollout. He pointed to the UK Government Communication Service as one of the strongest examples of scaled adoption. The team has embedded AI into communications planning through its existing OASIS framework, rather than treating it as a separate experiment.

4) GEO matters, but not in the simplistic way some may suggest

On GEO, Stuart’s framing was especially useful. He argued that PR teams should not think about it simply as a new flavour of search optimisation, but as a sign that AI is becoming a stakeholder in its own right. Just as a journalist, analyst or policymaker absorbs information from multiple sources and produces something new, AI systems are now doing a version of that too. The challenge is whether your organisation appears in AI summaries, and – most importantly - whether the information surfaced about them is accurate, current, well sourced and fair.

That distinction is important. Traditional search mostly surfaced what already existed. AI-generated answers synthesise and frame. That means PR teams have a much bigger reputational stake in what appears. It also means the old instinct to focus narrowly on Google rankings is not enough.

The timing of this conversation felt especially relevant, following PR Week reporting that AI has now overtaken media relations as the top investment priority for UK PR firms. At the same time, AMEC has just launched its new GEO Principles and a practitioner guide, designed to bring more rigour to how communications teams measure AI visibility and outputs. Stuart welcomed that shift, arguing that the industry badly needs better standards and less hype.

5) If you want accurate AI visibility, start by fixing your information footprint

His advice on improving AI visibility was reassuringly aligned with the priorities your comms team will already be working towards: developing a credible, consistent information footprint. If a story appears in earned media, the same facts should also exist on your website. If you have expert spokespeople, their biographies should clearly state their expertise on your site and on LinkedIn. The more consistent the touchpoints AI can find, the more likely it is to generate a reliable answer.

He shared a useful example of a university caught up in an industrial dispute. Its statements to media were precise, but they lived only in journalists’ coverage. The opposing side, meanwhile, had a much richer and more distributed digital footprint: website content, social posts, media commentary, repeated framing. AI systems naturally had more material to draw from, and so their answers reflected that side more strongly.

6) The next big issue is trust

One of the most interesting parts of our conversation was Stuart’s argument that organisations also need to think about the social licence for AI. In other words: even if a company can deploy AI, have they thought properly about how employees, customers, patients or other stakeholders will feel about it?

That struck me as especially relevant for health communications, where trust, clarity and explainability matter enormously. But it applies to every instance of AI rollout. If AI is introduced without proper communication around what it does, where the limits are, how decisions are made, and what safeguards exist around bias, accessibility or sustainability, scepticism is inevitable. The critical role for comms teams is to help organisations establish trust and buy-in ahead of AI transformation.

The comms lesson I’m taking away

If I had to boil Stuart’s advice down, it would be this: use AI to sharpen judgement, not replace it. Build habits before chasing the next shiny thing. Treat AI visibility as a reputation issue rather than a search issue. And remember that good AI use in PR still depends on the fundamentals: clear thinking, credible information, good training, consistent messaging and stakeholder trust. The agencies and in-house teams that get those basics right will be in a far stronger position to succeed in this new era of communications.

Want more from Stuart? Find him on LinkedIn.

I’ve been listening to…

📻 BBC Radio Sounds: Rethink… how we age. Biological aging, cellular regeneration, and the new science of epigenetics.

📻 The Guardian Audio Long Read: After a hard-fought victory to legalise medical cannabis in the UK, why is it still so hard to access?

I‘ve been reading…

🌍🤱 Lilia Sebouai writing in The Telegraph about 3 low-cost medtech innovations from British research teams aimed at preventing avoidable maternal deaths in some of the world’s poorest countries

🏥 Reflections from Arundhati Parmar in MedCity News about UnitedHealthcare’s bold PR play: they gave unprecedented access to journalists and others in order to show how the company is trying to reduce friction in healthcare. “The goal was to change hearts and minds. Did the insurance behemoth succeed?”

📆 Events for your diary

2nd July: Women in PR Summer Party

8th July: OHT Oxford, Investing in Inclusive Innovation, Networking drinks and panel discussion

9th July: AireFest, a Healthtech “day festival” in Leeds

14th July: OHT London, Crash & Learn: Healthtech Fails and What Came Next, Breakfast and panel discussion at Hale House

Today, Mumsnet is a community of around 8 million users, with around 700,000 posts each month and more than 1.5 million words posted every day - spanning everything from pregnancy and schooling to money, relationships, health and politics. In the last year alone, its campaigns have included work to End Medical Misogyny in the NHS, plus the high-profile Rage Against the Screen push for stronger protections for children online. Mumsnet amplifies and unites the voices of women who are too often ignored or elbowed out of traditional political circles, using the power of numbers to force policymakers to sit up and take note.

Mumsnet’s campaigns are held in high esteem by my peers in health comms and public affairs, so I was keen to interview the woman leading them and bring her reflections, advice and experiences to For Immediate Release readers.

Here are the highlights of our conversation — with a few practical takeaways for charities and campaigners who want to work with Mumsnet (or build Mumsnet-style campaigns of their own).

1) How Mumsnet decides what to campaign on

Jess: Out of all the pressing issues facing parents today – how do you decide where to double-down?

Rhiannon: All of our campaigns grow out of the conversations we’re seeing on our boards. We’re always paying attention to the themes and topics that are gaining traction. If a problem can be solved through peer-to-peer advice, great. But some problems are structural - a policy gap, an institutional blind spot, a system designed without women in mind. Those are the moments where a conversation needs to become a campaign.

We’ll often run polls and surveys with users or use analysis tools to digest huge volumes of conversation and pull out repeated themes. Our medical misogyny work is a great example: we produced a report built on analysis of close to 100,000 conversations over a decade, backed up with a survey on women’s experiences. This gave us our headline finding that nearly 60% of women believe the NHS is institutionally misogynistic.

That pattern-not-anecdote approach is the thread running through everything Mumsnet does: stories give you the human truth; scale gives you the legitimacy to argue for systems change.

2) What happens when a charity asks Mumsnet to back an issue?

Jess: I imagine you’re often approached by charities, activists and campaigners hoping to collaborate with you. How do you decide who to work with?

Rhiannon: We do get a huge amount of inbound. The first test is relevance: is this something Mumsnet users are already talking about, or likely to care about? The second is mission-fit: will this make parents’ lives easier? If it passes those two big tick boxes, we’ll explore what’s realistic given limited resource.

Partnership can mean different things. Mumsnet is part of coalitions (for example on early education and childcare). But we can also support more informally — by giving campaigners space on the boards, running a guest post, amplifying on social, and sometimes including activity in emails. A guest post isn’t automatically an endorsement, but it can be a route to put an issue in front of parents, even when Mumsnet isn’t leading the campaign.

If you’re a charity or campaigner wanting to partner with Mumsnet, here’s what to do:

• Start with evidence of relevance. Before you pitch, search the Mumsnet boards (and your own channels) to understand how parents are already talking about the issue. Your email should reflect that language, not just your organisational framing.

• Be clear on the “make life easier” angle. Spell out the practical barrier you’re trying to remove for parents (cost, time, access, stigma, safety) and what change would look like.

• Offer an option that respects limited resource. Come with 2–3 lightweight ways Mumsnet could help (e.g., a guest post, a hosted Q&A thread with an expert, a short survey/poll, signposting to support), rather than a fully-fledged, multi-month campaign ask.

• Expect Mumsnet to sense-check through their community. If the issue isn’t showing up on the boards, be open to reframing, timing it differently, or building awareness first.
  
  

3) The ingredients of a campaign journalists and policymakers can’t ignore

Jess: When you think about media engagement with campaigns, what do you believe are the non-negotiables?

Rhiannon: It’s about getting the right combination of elements. Mumsnet’s anonymity means women share personal, sometimes sensitive experiences. Those accounts are powerful in their own right - and the wider media will often quote Mumsnet posts as a temperature check on what parents are saying about a given topic. But the campaigns become truly hard to dismiss when those stories are backed by scale: survey findings, or analysis that shows the same themes repeating across thousands of posts.

This is where policy and systems change campaigning can learn from community platforms. If you can only tell one heartbreaking story, you’ll get sympathy. If you can show the story is part of a pattern - and explain the structural reason it keeps happening - you can make the case for change. You’re not arguing that something went wrong; you’re arguing that the system is currently designed to produce this outcome.

4) Getting traction with policymakers: the effective basics

Jess: Policymakers now treat Mumsnet as a trusted barometer. What’s your advice for organisations trying to build that kind of policy influence from scratch?

Rhiannon: Start with the people who already care - or have a reason to care - about your mission. I always recommend a deliberately practical approach: map the MPs, peers, select committee members, APPGs, advisers and officials who have shown interest (questions asked, campaigns backed, relevant constituencies), then build the case with them first. When you do that groundwork well, it’s so much easier to create a small group of informed champions who can pull the issue up the agenda from inside the system.

For comms teams, the takeaway is to treat policy influence like any other campaign: define the change you want, identify the decision-makers who can deliver it, and then plan the route to yes step by step.

5) Social media can provide excellent leverage (if you use it well)

Jess: Have the recent changes in audience media consumption habits forced you to change the way you run your campaigns?

Rhiannon: I think it’san opportunity for campaigners. If MPs increasingly get news via social platforms, why not embrace that as your route in? Traditional media still gives credibility, but social gives campaigners (especially smaller, grassroots ones) more control. Ultimately, you can invest time in building your own channels and reliably reach people, whereas press coverage will always be at the mercy of the day’s news agenda.

It’s important to remember that social is more than a direct broadcast channel - it’s where communities already exist. Just look at the huge networks of women sharing advice on conditions like endometriosis on Instagram and TikTok: lived experience, peer support, practical scripts for navigating appointments. So embracing social media can also be a way of bringing those existing conversations and experiences into a wider campaign.

The comms lesson I’m taking away

If you’re trying to build campaigns that shift systems with limited resource, the Mumsnet playbook is reassuringly replicable: listen for the pattern, quantify it, tell the story with care, and then do the unglamorous work of coalition-building and stakeholder mapping. That’s how you earn trust - and how you convert community voice into change.

🏆 Health PR Campaign Inspo

To mark Skin Cancer Awareness Month,Melanoma Focus launched ‘The Life Saving Haircut’: an awareness and education campaign that centred around the publication of the first handbook for barbers that teaches how to spot the early signs of melanoma on the head and neck. The project was born from a collaboration between independent creative directors Michele Bona, Chiara Biondi, and Michael De Piano, and is a brilliant example of targeting cancer education to a non-medical group with huge untapped potential to flag cancer warning signs at the early stages.

📚 Long Read: ‘There is no way to stop this’: ‘Biotech Barbie’ Cathy Tie on her mission to genetically modify babies. This interveiw/deep-dive in The Guardian by Jenny Kleeman is as compelling as it is crazy.

🤣 Short Reads:

• For my PharmaTimes column this month, I spoke to Ivanna Rosendal, a long-time life sciences podcaster and newly trained stand-up comic. She told me why pharma comms needs a sense of humour…

• In a world of AI-generated healthcare information, how do we protect the truth? My reflections on the PharmaLetter x Fleishman Hillard panel debate in May.

📆 Events:

Tuesday 9th June, Women’s Health Pitch Competition + Open Mic Pitching & Networking,The Ministry, Borough

Thursday 11 June, One Year of Hale House & HLTH Europe London Warm up, Marylebone

Tuesday 23 June, One HealthTech London Social, The Ministry, Borough

Thursday 25 June, Frontier Biotech 2.0: Five Tables, Euston

Thursday 2 July, Women in PR Summer Party, Spitalfields

In a highly saturated health media landscape, landing coverage that actually cuts through comes down to one thing: the offer. Not the press release, not the subject line, not how well you know the journalist. The offer. Is it compelling, genuinely distinctive, and rooted in what readers are curious about right now?

It sounds obvious, but it is surprisingly hard to deliver consistently. As PRs, there is only so much picking and choosing of clients we can do, and even the most fascinating organisations will not hand you an endless stream of front-page-ready news.

So we have to be strategic, creative and properly switched on to both audience trends and the scientific discourse in our clients’ fields. That is where the opportunities live: spotting the moment, building the narrative, and pitching the right person at the right time with the right ingredients already lined up.

A bit of insight from great editors can go a long way. This month I was lucky enough to hear directly from Claudia Canavan, Health Editor and Journalist. With editorial stints across consumer health titles, and her current role shaping health and wellness features at the New Scientist, she is a brilliant barometer for what audiences are engaging with now and what PRs can do to make pitches genuinely useful.

The trends Claudia is seeing right now

Healthy ageing and longevity – how do we improve our ‘healthspan’? Think brain health, bone density, frailty, and what prevention looks like in real life - including cancer prevention. The strongest angles explain what the evidence says now, what is coming next, and where the hype does not match reality.

Sexual wellness – perhaps unsurprisingly, this still pulls readers in. Claudia’s point was not ‘sex sells’ in a shallow way, but that people have a real appetite for credible advice, lived experience and the more unexpected intersections. For example, how sexual wellbeing relates to menopause, mental health, pain, sleep, relationships and ageing.

Weight loss drugs – this has dominated and will keep dominating. The bar is now much higher: you need to bring something genuinely new, not a reheated take. Claudia suggested looking forward (how will GLP-1s reshape services, access and outcomes at scale?) and looking sideways (how does jab-mediated thinness change work, social life, stigma, identity, dating, mental health, even what we think ‘healthy’ looks like?).

Neuroplasticity and self-improvement – we all want to break bad habits, curb our phone addictions, and become the ‘best version’ of ourselves. People crave a clear explanation of why their brains do what they do (often self-sabotagingly), plus guidance that is specific and realistic. For PRs, the opportunity is expert voices who can translate the science without talking down to readers.

To secure cut-though, bring expert voices to the table, take unusual angles, and join the dots between trends in a way that surprises people without stretching credibility. And when you do have a timely hook, do not stop at “why now?”. The stronger pitches also answer “what next?”, and give an editor something they can turn into a proper feature, not just a quick quote.

So what does Claudia actually want from PRs?

First, you have to make it easy for an editor to believe the story is real. Claudia’s benchmark was simple: bring at least three reputable scientific papers that point in the same direction, so it is not a one-off finding or a flimsy claim. Keeping an eye on pre-prints and what is emerging from scientific conferences helps here, because you can flag what is coming next, not what everyone has already covered.

Second, you need the people. That means an available, highly qualified, media-trained expert who can actually speak on the phone, and not in three weeks’ time. And if it is a human story, you need eloquent, available case studies, ideally with pictures, who are comfortable speaking directly to a journalist.

Third, bring the specifics that make a feature sing: data, examples and proof points that back up the point you are trying to make. But just as important, translate the function into impact. What changes for someone in real life, and why should they care? That is usually the difference between useful information and a story that pulls people in.

Finally, keep the audience and format front of mind. Most readers of health content are curious, intelligent members of the public who want a deeper explanation, not a lecture. Claudia’s wider point is that advice-heavy health stories can feel repetitive (“do these five things…”) unless there is nuance, contradiction, and humanity in the mix. Your job as a PR is to help an editor tell a richer story: context, trade-offs, what the evidence really says, and what it might mean next.

One last thing she flagged: build relationships early. A quick note to an editor sharing genuinely interesting work coming down the line can do more for long-term credibility than ten cold pitches fired off on a slow Tuesday. And when you do pitch, make the first paragraph do the heavy lifting: the hook, what is new, why it matters to readers, the evidence in one line, then who is available (expert and case study) and what they can offer (phone, photos, data). Time-poor editors will thank you for it.

In short: bring a genuinely distinctive angle, show credible evidence, line up the right voices, and write the pitch like you respect an editor’s time. If you can do that while staying curious about what audiences are actually talking about, you can (almost) bet that quality media coverage will soon follow.

🏆 PR Inspo

At the end of April, the winners of the PR Week Corporate Affairs Awards 2026 were announced. Lots of brilliant health work was highlighted this year, including Golin’s ‘Auntie army’ campaign for Specsavers which won gold in the ‘Best Use of Media Relations - Pharma/Healthcare’ and the ‘Best Public Health Awareness Campaign’ categories.

During National Eye Health Week, the campaign encouraged more goodnatured nagging at family events and in WhatsApp groups, driving behaviour change and increased eye testing to improve the early diagnosis of glaucoma among black communities.

📚 Reading List

👉 Attending the SomX x Neko Health Future of Prevention event at Hale House got me thinking differently about the role of comms in closing the healthly lifespan gap - I wrote about it on LinkedIn.

🤝 My second column for PharmaTimes was published at the start of May! It features an interview with the brilliant Kylie Cuff, Global Communications (Vaccines) at GSK. We spoke about how her team has been adapting and responding to recent challenges, and she shared some sound advice on how to co-create behaviour change campaigns that strike the right chord with patients.

😷 “Hantavirus misinformation runs rampant as the US is unequipped to respond to infectious disease health scare” A worrying article by Melody Schreiber in The Guardian about the dangerous consequences of broken public health systems and prolific misinformation in the US.

📆 IRL events for your diary

12th May: THE GREAT HEALTHCARE DEBATE: in a world of AI generated healthcare information, how do we protect the truth? (London)

20th May: Women in Public Affairs: Women Leading Women’s Healthcare, Redesigning Systems around Lived Experience (London)

21st May: Innovation in Action: Successful Women’s Clinical Trial Case Studies (London)

26th May: OPUS x SomX: HealthTech Unfiltered (London)

28th May: Social Media & Human Health: An Evening with the Centre for Technology and the Body, King's College (London)

The Middle East has a thriving healthcare market with a world-leading tech and advanced digital model. Add in an enthusiastic investment landscape and strong government support for health sector, and it’s no wonder that healthtech companies are falling over themselves to establish a foothold in the region. But commercial success and adoption in the unique markets of the GCC is not a given and getting comms and PR approach right is essential from day 1.

For this month’s expert interview, I spoke with Lavanya Mandal, a highly experienced communicator who has spent nearly 13 years in Dubai leading healthcare comms across both the UAE, Saudi and Middle East, and today runs global corporate, business and internal comms at Aster DM Healthcare (15,000 colleagues across the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries alone). In our conversation, she shared a very grounded view of what actually works in Gulf health communications: start local, earn trust through credible voices, keep the doctor–patient relationship front and centre, and when the region is in crisis, lead with empathy and your people first.

Her first point was blunt: in healthcare, comms in the GCC is deeply local. “The messaging that we have for UAE, it doesn’t work for Saudi,” she told me. But it’s not just language - how media works, how people consume information, and what they consider credible also differs greatly between countries.

In Saudi, Lavanya explains that news consumption is more ‘social-first’: fewer people are reading newspapers or watching TV news in the traditional way; and whilst radio still matters, TikTok and Snapchat dominate. “People actually research the news on Snapchat,” she said. In the UAE, by contrast, the mix is broader. It’s social media and established outlets (print and online), alongside government-driven channels that still carry weight. The UAE’s demographics - Emiratis living alongside Western, Indian and Southeast Asian expats - creates a more varied set of behaviours.

That need for localisation shows up most sharply in how trust is built. Lavanya’s approach is a deliberate mix of owned channels and third-party credibility. Posting on your own social channels can perform well (especially with paid support), but she’s seen the same information land better when it’s carried by a trusted outside voice. In practice, that means building up doctors as visible opinion leaders - and then selectively partnering with credible creators who speak to specific needs (she mentioned women’s health and maternity as an example).

One of the most useful insights for anyone used to the NHS is her observation that patients in parts of the GCC behave more like consumers. With insurance coverage (particularly in the UAE), word-of-mouth carries huge influence: “a mum who’s about to deliver… would rather go with a doctor that has been recommended to her by a friend than an influencer.” People can change doctors more often, which makes clinician reputation and consistency even more important.

On influencer partnerships, she was clear-eyed about the risk: guardrails matter. Her team sets benchmarks early (what “good” looks like, and what value the partner can genuinely add) and reviews content before it goes out. She also pointed out a contextual factor that changes the risk profile: the UAE market is “very guarded”, with tighter controls on what can be said publicly and more caution from creators. That doesn’t remove reputational risk - but it does mean the operating environment is different.

And yes, misinformation is a daily reality - especially in high-volume, high-anxiety categories like obesity and weight management. When social platforms drive the conversation, Lavanya’s playbook is to bring evidence and authority into the feed: work with credible media, put clinicians forward, and validate messages against recognised sources (she referenced international and local government authorities) before amplifying. Importantly, she sees this as a shared responsibility. In the GCC, government often leads on counter-misinformation, with private providers adding their voice and reach.

On health tech, Lavanya described digital as a “top priority” for healthcare providers in the region because it’s a practical answer to real system constraints - connectivity, geography, and access - and it supports the region’s ambition to become a healthcare hub. But as a comms leader, she’s careful about the framing. Aster has the advantage of being an integrated provider with physical services already in place, so digital can be positioned as convenience and continuity, not replacement. Book on the app; consult online if you can’t travel; see the same doctor in person when you need to. The narrative isn’t “technology will fix healthcare” - it’s “these tools are making it easier for you to access the people who care for you.”

Even with AI-driven diagnostics and robotic surgery, the principle holds: “we always position them as enablers.” Tech sits around the clinician to help them work faster, diagnose more precisely, and deliver better care - while the doctor–patient connection stays “of utmost value”.

The most timely part of our discussion was how her comms approach has shifted in the context of the current conflict in the Middle East. Lavanya framed it as people-first, internal-first. In a healthcare business, the majority of colleagues are frontliners coming into work every day; if you don’t look after their wellbeing, everything else is secondary.

What that looked like in practice: direct leadership communication , reassurance without pretending things are easy, and - crucially - acknowledging what people are feeling. “The empathy-driven approach has worked better for us… the messaging around ‘we are there with you, we are all together in this’.” HR backed this with practical mental health and wellbeing initiatives and clear signposting to support.

Her biggest lesson echoes COVID: be agile, and don’t over-engineer comms when the ground reality is moving. In her words, healthcare comms has to roll out “quickly… to address the ground reality and address some of the issues or challenges that the organisation might be facing.” And the hierarchy of priorities is simple: people first, because they’re the ones delivering the care your reputation is built on.

If you’re doing health, health tech or comms work in (or entering) the GCC, here are the principles I’m taking away from Lavanya’s playbook: localise by default (country-by-country, channel-by-channel); build trust through clinicians and credible third parties, not just brand accounts; assume misinformation will show up in clinic and plan content that counters it with validated sources; frame digital and AI as tools that strengthen the doctor–patient relationship, not replace it; and in crisis, communicate with empathy, at speed, and internally first.

🫦 April PR Campaign Inspo: “Yes Sex Please, We’re British”

Samantha Niblett, the Labour MP for South Derbyshire, has joined forces with Cindy Gallop, the founder of Make Love Not Porn, to launch a campaign aimed at “helping us better understand consent, prevent abuse and violence, and raise awareness of how everything from childbirth to the menopause impacts our sex lives and the satisfaction – or lack thereof – we find in them.”

The duo’s calls for a ‘summer of sex’ in Britain was met with a huge reaction from MPs, the media and the public, recieved wall-to-wall coverage and endless column inches. So whether you think it’s crucial or crass, this campaign has already succeeded in starting a national conversation about modern sex education.

📚 Reading

• FutureFemHealth’s new premium model gives subscribers access to high-value market intel and journalistic deep-dives you won’t find anywhere else.

• I was VERY proud to make my debut as an official PharmaTimes columnist in April! I’ve got some great interviews with Pharma comms leaders lined up - watch this space.

📻 Listening

• PR Week’s new Media Leader’s interview podcast series began with an interview with City AM’s Editor in Chief:

📺 Watching

• Babies, a beautiful, raw and heartbreaking iPlayer drama follows a couple’s journey through infertility and miscarriages. This will have you sobbing!

📆 Events

April 21// The Creator Economy - CensHership- Women’s Health, & Fundraising. A Panel + Workshop

April 23// Ministry of Healthtech Spring Fling

April 23 // Venture Cafe Thursday Gathering: The TechBio Shift: Powering the Next Era of Life Sciences in London

April 28 // OHT Mental Health: Coffee Chat: The “Ghosting” Problem - Solving Attrition in Digital Therapeutics

April 28 // Healthtech Talks, SomX x Neko Health. The Future of Prevention: Who Pays, Who Delivers, Who Benefits?

April 29 // Women in PR Members Mixer

April 30 // OHT Oxford x Unprescribed Stories: Bringing creativity to healthcare

April 30 // Roxhill Health Club: Journalist PR Masterclass Sessions

May 6 // Pre-seed to Series A. How Do We Move Women’s Health Along? Nexus Report Findings and Panel Discussion

According to YouGov research, 40% of Gen Z get health information from social media, almost twice the rate of older generations. 33% of this same generation report they have let a content creator with no medical training influence a personal health decision.

The ways in which the public access and consume health information are fundamentally changing. But specifically, it’s the role of the clinician creator that I’ve been thinking about non-stop since reading Deb Cohen’s new book, Bad Influence.

My own deep-dive led me to a 2025 BMJ analysis, in which Raffael Heiss and colleagues explain how health conversations are unfolding in commercialised spaces that mix expertise, entrepreneurship, and entertainment, and how this exposes users to bias and potential harm. They identify four overlapping biases - limited expertise, industry influence, entrepreneurial interests, and personal belief - and call for stronger governmental regulation, platform moderation, and improved digital literacy.

I felt compelled to understand the perspective of a ‘social media’ clinician on these challenges and how they understand their own role and responsibilities in online spaces. This led me to Dr Liz O’Riordan, a former consultant breast surgeon, three-time breast cancer patient, author, and one of the UK’s most trusted clinician voices online. Through Instagram, YouTube and her writing, she spends her time explaining breast cancer in plain English, calling out misinformation, and answering the questions patients are often too scared or overwhelmed to ask in clinic.

I sat down with Liz to talk about what it actually means to be a ‘clinician creator’, the ethical grey areas that come with that role, and how health brands can work with clinicians without undermining trust.

Translating, not influencing

Liz doesn’t particularly love the term ‘clinician creator’. In the past she’s called herself a ‘meducator’ – a word that never quite caught on, but captures the point. What she’s doing isn’t influencing; it’s translating. For Liz, the role exists because there is a huge gap between what patients need to understand and what the health system has the time, funding or skills to explain.

After her first breast cancer diagnosis, Liz started posting online almost accidentally. What began as sharing her own experience quickly became something more purposeful: explaining breast cancer, debunking viral myths, and responding to the fear she saw playing out daily in her DMs. Over time, she realised she was becoming a trusted interface between patients and a healthcare system that often feels opaque, rushed and frightening.

That trust is not something Liz takes lightly. People come to her because they don’t know who else to believe. Algorithms reward confidence over accuracy, follower counts are mistaken for expertise, and misinformation preys on people at their most vulnerable. Liz sees her role as being the calm, evidence-based voice in the noise – not shouting people down, but helping them understand why something isn’t true, and what we actually know.

Ethics, boundaries and why the current system is failing clinicians

Being a clinician online comes with a set of ethical challenges that medicine has not caught up with. Liz is clear that the emotional labour alone is significant. She receives hundreds of messages from strangers asking for personalised medical advice, sharing traumatic stories, or looking for reassurance she simply cannot give. Learning to set boundaries – including using stock responses and not engaging beyond general information – has been essential for survival.

There’s also the issue of money. Creating high-quality educational content takes time, equipment, editing and research, yet many clinicians feel uncomfortable charging for that work – or don’t know what fair compensation even looks like. At the same time, some are being offered large sums to promote products they’ve never used, often with minimal guidance on what is acceptable.

Liz is blunt about the fact that current regulation isn’t good enough. GMC guidance hasn’t kept pace with reality, and there are no clear frameworks to help doctors navigate brand deals, disclosures, parasocial relationships or misinformation responsibly. She believes social media activity should be part of professional appraisal, not to punish clinicians, but to encourage transparency and reflection. Without guardrails, everyone is left exposed – clinicians, patients and companies alike.

How health brands can work with clinician creators – without breaking trust

Despite the risks, Liz is clear that ethical collaboration between clinicians and health brands is possible – and often valuable. The line, for her, is intent and transparency. Paying a clinician to promote a product they don’t use, don’t believe in, or can’t evidence is a red flag. Paying a clinician for their time, expertise and honest opinion is not.

Pharma and healthtech companies, in particular, have an opportunity to work with clinicians on education rather than promotion. Funding disease awareness, explainer content, or panel discussions where clinicians are free to speak openly allows brands to support better understanding without borrowing clinical authority to sell. Declaring relationships clearly, limiting how long content is live, and avoiding anything that could be mistaken for medical advice all matter.

Ultimately, Liz’s advice is simple: respect the trust clinicians have earned. That trust is built slowly and can be lost instantly. Brands that understand this – and design partnerships accordingly – will not only avoid ethical pitfalls, but create work that genuinely helps patients, clinicians and the wider health system.

Follow Liz on Instagram and YouTube

🩸 PR Inspo

Period tracking app Clue launched their Cost of Bleeding Campaign this month, calling on government to provide free sanitary products to women and girls across England and Wales. Media personality and women’s health advocate Ashley James fronts the campaign, which is hooked on consumer research revealing that menstruating costs an average of £20,359 over their lifetime.

Sign the petition and receive a free year-long Clue Plus app subscription.

👀 Your read and listen list

📻 When It Hits The Fan – How do PR pros spin LLMs and navigate the new frontier of reputation management?

💉 A thoughtful article on the Canterbury meningitis outbreak that considers the UKHSA response, the political response, the media framing, university communication, and the lessons for public health policymakers.

☀️ A news piece explaining how fact-checkers forced the Department of Health and Social Care to backtrack on a public health comms campaign that compared the risks of sunbeds to smoking.

📆 Events

March 24// Bold & Beyond: fertility, family forming and the spaces in between. Panel discussion and moderated workshop, Moorgate

April 14// One HealthTech’s 10^th Anniversary Bash, Farringdon

April 23// Ministry of Healthtech Spring Fling, Shoreditch

PR is a skill you can’t learn from books or training programmes alone. The most valuable lessons come from experience, and from conversations with colleagues and journalists. That’s why I make a point of speaking to as many PRs I admire as possible, as often as possible! This month I wanted to share one of those conversations with you for inspiration and food for thought.

I recently sat down with Kate Kelham, communications strategist and founder of Kelham Communications Studio, who has navigated the high-stakes worlds of both Fortune 500 engineering giants and fast-scaling global healthtech startups including Kry and Tandem. We discussed the evolving role of the comms professional in an era of tightened budgets and AI-driven noise, how healthtechs can nail their messaging around AI, and advice for comms leaders looking to secure that all-important seat at the top table. Here are *just some* of the points and her words of advice that particularly stuck with me.

1. Healthtech’s complexity shapes the work

We discussed why the first step towards building an effective comms strategy for an early‑stage healthtech company is to understand the full sweep of stakeholders. Kate explained the importance of identifying the different motivations and pain-points for all these groups. At Kry (a digital GP video consultation platform), this included NHS partners, private insurers, patients, commercial clients, and internal teams - each with its own decision cycles, risk thresholds and language.

“Everyone wants something different,” she told me. For comms, the challenge is to create a narrative that can stretch across audiences without losing coherence. Regulatory demands add further constraints, and the landscape shifts constantly, but strong comms functions treat this complexity as the design parameter rather than an obstacle.

2. Startups need comms that can sprint - and still see the horizon

Founders live in the urgency of the present day. Plans change quickly, launches slip, and priorities evolve overnight. Kate’s response to that environment is a comms planning model that delivers quick wins while preserving a longer‑term direction.

My own experience of being embedded in startup life means I can attest that twelve‑month plans rarely survive even a quarter! And yet - the organisation still needs someone to keep an eye fixed firmly on managing the wider arc of the story. Effective comms leaders take both of these responsibilities seriously: they stay close to the immediate needs of founders, but they’re also thinking constantly about narrative consistency, and where the organisation wants to move next. That’s the combination that allows you to work reactively whilst staying strategic.

3. Founders want evidence of progress that matters to the bottom line

When runways are short, C-suite teams want to see clear justification for every comms investment. This can feel stifling for PRs who aren’t used to translating metrics like trust, share of voice and sentiment into ‘founder friendly’ language, and Kate advised that the most productive starting point for PRs in this position is to understand what the leadership team hopes to change - in behaviour, perception or decisions.

She explained how at Kry, once the business matured into a healthcare provider, the comms goals shifted. The focus became influencing NHS stakeholders, strengthening credibility, supporting commercial partnerships, and enabling the product to land in the right environments. Media coverage became the supporting detail, not the headline metric.

Kate also reiterated the importance for comms teams in early stage healthtechs to work closely with growth, product and commercial leads - embedding comms activity and consistent messaging at every stage of the pipeline and customer success programme. When the comms function is connected to the revenue engine, founders can join the dots and see the value far earlier! This is how you unlock more trust and independence alongside more budget.

4. AI projects tend to fall down at the communication stage

We’ve all heard the proclamation that “every business is an AI business now”. But this shift is bringing a big comms challenge that’s stalling adoption. Leadership teams make decisions at speed and set ambitious AI agendas, yet the people in the company receive little context or practical guidance on how to use the tools safely or meaningfully. As a result, the work stalls, confusion spreads, and fear narratives fill the vacuum.

Kate’s advice on managing this comms challenge is to define and communicate around the problem first, then explain exactly how AI can address it, and then provide teams with clear boundaries, processes and support around the tool itself. The outcome is adoption based on understanding and self-motivation, meaning it’s much more likely to stick!

5. Global growth depends on local grounding and a diverse visibility strategy

Geographic expansion always brings a comms dilemma - do you try to manage international PR centrally from HQ, or take the risk of sub-contracting with local partners? Kate’s view is that companies expanding into new markets need some form of local expertise — whether through freelancers or agencies. Local language, regulatory nuance, media conventions and health system structures matter too much to ignore.

The most productive model is a partnership: global teams set the frameworks, tone and priorities; local teams adapt, translate and surface opportunities. Strong communication runs both ways, and the best stories often originate closer to the ground.

At the same time, shrinking newsrooms and limited editorial resources are making media coverage is harder to secure at both the national and the global level. It’s important to design any global comms toolkit with this in mind.

For Kate, the question is simple: where are your stakeholders actually paying attention? If the answer includes micro‑influencers, self‑publishing platforms or specialist communities, then they deserve a place in the strategy.

Why this moment matters for comms people

Kate and I agreed that the communications industry is entering a defining period. AI is reshaping the information environment. Misinformation travels faster and embeds deeper. Stakeholders expect clarity, consistency and honesty. Teams move quicker, markets shift faster, and narratives slip out of the hands of organisations that don’t manage them actively.

The traditional split between internal and external comms no longer reflects how information moves. Kate expects the next phase of comms maturity to involve integrated teams that shape a single narrative, tailored for different environments but consistent in intent and clarity. In this phase, comms becomes the connective tissue: across functions, products, markets and expectations, and for healthtech companies, this means comms’ seat at the top table must be locked in.

What a note to end on! Huge thanks to Kate for the discussion.

PR Inspo

I first saw this campaign as a Tube platform advert and it made such a strong impression on me I was thinking about it all day!

Peanut, the community app for mums, and Tommee-Tippee, the baby product brand, have partnered to launch a campaign calling for the term matrescence to be added to the dictionary.

Peanut’s suggested definition of matrescence is: “1. The physical, psychological, emotional and social process of becoming a mother. 2. The most profound neurological reorganization of the adult human brain observed to date.”

I’ll be watching how this campaign evolves and hoping it succeeds in shining a light on the neurological impact of motherhood and the need for improved post-natal mental health support.

Tommee-Tippee appointed The Romans to a global PR brief back in October, so I’m going to assume this was a Romans-led project 👏

It’s been a busy month of launches in the health comms world. ICYMI:

• I went to a brilliant panel discussion organised by The Women’s Domain, featuring CensHERship’s Anna O Sullivan and Clio Wood sharing the findings of their new whitepaper: The Bias Burden: why women’s health businesses struggle to access financial services. This work is an evolution of their brilliant campaigning to expose hidden censorship of femtech and women’s health and the huge impact this has.

• Talking Taboos Foundation, a charity with a mission to unearth health and social taboo topics whose unspoken nature isolates and prevents people from seeking help, have released their Today’s Taboos 2026 Report. A very important read for communicators.

• I attended a packed event at LSE to hear the incredible Deborah Cohen being interviewed to mark the launch of her new book, Bad Influence, and about the big, complicated questions that have emerged in parallel to the rise of the social media ‘health influencer’, the new landscape of health information, and new hierarchies of trust.

Dates for Your Diary: March

🚺 One HealthTech have a cracking line-up for their International Women’s Day evening event at Hale House on March 5th. RSVP here.

🥯The OHT London Hub are back with another breakfast panel session on March 10th, asking whether at-home diagnostics are empowering or excluding patients by shifting the burden of healthcare responsibility. RSVP here.

💃 I could NOT be more excited to go to Women’s Health Horizons in London this month - the agenda for the one-day conference looks 10/10. Let me know if you’re planning to go too 😊 Tickets still available here.

Building a profile was, for a long time, something I would pour all my effort into doing for other people. After all, it’s bread-and-butter work if you’re a PR in health, tech or any other sector. It is easy to let your own professional identity sit on the back burner while you focus on the day job.

However, once I understood that having a professional personal brand is just as important for PRs as it is for our clients, I began to experiment with applying the same strategies and tactics I’d been using to help companies and founders. It was liberating to have free reign, and I felt a lot less stressed about getting it wrong!

Over the past few years I have invested a lot of time and energy into network-building, community-building, and trying my best to show up and build a reputation that reflects who I am and what I care about. It’s definitely been a steep learning curve and I’ve made plenty of mistakes along the way, but it’s unlocked exciting opportunities for me and for my clients and I’ve met many amazing people. In the spirit of paying it forward, I thought I’d share some advice for those of you looking to take the first steps in profile building in 2026.

The foundations

Scattered, ad-hoc activity rarely leads to meaningful connections. Start with a strategy!

What is your one line? The first question you’re going to be asked, 90% of the time at work events is “What do you do?”. Don’t just repeat your job title. Focus on the problem you solve. For example, instead of saying you are a Health PR, try “I help digital health startups communicate the value of their product to NHS decision-makers”. It is about being memorable and specific.

Identify your audience and your value-add Who do you actually want to talk to? If you are looking for a new role, your audience is hiring managers and recruiters. If you are a founder, it is investors and potential partners. Once you know who they are, ask yourself what you can offer them. Personal branding is not about shouting into the void; it is about providing value, whether that is sharing niche industry insights, curating relevant news, or offering a fresh perspective on health policy.

Choose your channels and pillars Do not try to be everywhere. For our sector, LinkedIn is the clear leader, but perhaps you find your community on niche Slack groups or Substack. Pick two channels and stick to them. Within those, define three ‘content pillars’: the specific topics you want to be known for. This keeps your output consistent and prevents wasted hours trying to think of ideas for a post.

Insights from the front line

I recently co-organised a panel event for One Health Tech’s London hub on a very similar topic: personal branding for clinicians. We heard from Dr Annabelle Painter, Dr Jonathan Andrews, and Alex Prinsley, who have all built significant profiles within the healthtech space.

The overwhelming consensus was that authenticity trumps metrics every time. In healthcare especially, credibility is the only currency that matters. Chasing viral posts or high engagement numbers is a distraction. Instead, focus on building trust. If you are a clinician moving into tech, talk about the realities of the frontline. If you are in PR, talk about the challenges of health communications. People connect with real experiences, not polished corporate speak.

But don’t take my word for it - hear what our guests learned from the session.

The 90/10 rule

One of the best pieces of advice for anyone hesitant about LinkedIn comes from healthtech social media MVP Dr Zhong Wei Khor. He suggests a 90/10 approach: 90% of your spotlight should go on the issue you care about, and 10% on you.

In practice, this means the vast majority of your output should be about the industry/world you operate within: health equity, AI regulation, or NHS procurement, for example. This builds your reputation as an expert. The remaining 10% is where you get personal. This does not mean over-sharing about your last Hinge date disaster. It means sharing some of the human experience and emotion that drives you, motivates you, and makes you relatable. Why did you move into healthtech? What was a hard lesson you learned this week? This 10% is what makes people like and trust you, while the 90% makes them respect you.

What to do this month

If you want to move the needle on your personal brand before the month is out, here is a checklist of practical steps:

• Update your bio: Ensure your LinkedIn headline reflects your one line rather than just your current employer.

• Research five influencers: Find five people in the health, PR, or tech intersection whose work you admire. Follow them and, more importantly, engage with their comments.

• Be active in communities: If you are in a professional Slack group or WhatsApp community, aim to answer one question or share one helpful link per week.

• Commit to one event: Whether it is a formal panel or an informal coffee, get one in-person or virtual networking event in the diary.

• Audit your pillars: Write down the three things you want to be known for and check if your last three posts or interactions reflect them.

Building a network is a marathon, but it starts with these small, intentional sprints. Personal branding is simply the act of making sure the right people know who you are and what you stand for. There is no better time to start than now.

PR Inspo

This brilliantly-executed integrated campaign from Saachi & Saachi for the British Heart Foundation saw 65 red benches across the UK, honouring 65 people who’ve survived heart disease and marking 65 years of lifesaving work by the BHF. The striking benches, each one with a human story, are a sure-fire PR hit across national, local and social media. Those photos!!

Marie Curie, the 2026 TCS London Marathon Charity of the Year, has partnered with running community Run Your Mind to launch ‘Grief run clubs’. The campaign by The Academy responds to new research revealing that over one in four people turn to running to cope with the death of a loved one. A great example of how real-world activations can be a force for good within communities, and perfectly aligned to Marie Curie’s position as a marathon charity.

📻 I’ve been listening to…

Too Much Information, a refreshingly honest podcast hosted by Issy Warburton that isn’t afraid to get right into the women’s health topics that are awkward, taboo, complex or silenced.

📘 I’ve been reading…

Veteran health journalist Deborah Cohen’s new book, Bad Influence: How the Internet Hijacked Our Health - a deep-dive into the commodification of health in an age of anxiety, asking if - and why -we can no longer distinguish medicine from marketing.

📲 Events in my diary for the next month…

28/01,Webinar from The King’s Fund: What’s in store for health and care in 2026?

28/01,100 Female Founders breakfast with Nexus and Barclays: Women’s health innovators, fundraising and GTM

29/01,Women in PR AGM

10/02,Bad Influence book launch hosted by LSE Health

11/02,One Health Tech breakfast at Hale House: The panel will be debating whether the patient’s voice is the most important voice in healthtech

24/02,100 Female Founders breakfast with Nexus and Barclays: Health Innovators, AI in women’s health

25/02,Women in PR Members Mixer

26/02,The Women’s Domain and CensHERship whitepaper launch event: Breaking the Digital Barriers in Women’s Health

I was asked to write an article for December’s edition of PharmaTimes that looked ahead to the health comms trends of 2026 (read it here!). One of the predictions I included was that the boom in niche communities would continue, fuelled by a desire for more real human interaction and connection, and that comms people really need to pay attention to this. Keen to dig into this properly, I’ve dedicated this month’s post to a celebration and exploration of community building in healthtech.

What’s going on?

Since late 2024, I’ve watched a rapid growth in the number of groups emerging to unite people with shared passions and professional ambitions in health and tech. These aren’t your standard LinkedIn groups. They are typically referral-only, closed memberships that thrive on a mix of digital and physical connection. They have regular IRL touchpoints (meetups, panel events, parties), they keep the conversation flowing in WhatsApp groups and Slack channels, and they deliver genuine value through Substacks, podcasts, and content.

I’ve been part of this evolution myself in 2025, recently joining the One HealthTech London Hub team to help plan and organise inclusive, unique events, connecting with Voyagers for several dinners and to deliver THE FIX festival in September, and being a proud early member of both NXGN and Ministry of Healthtech (more on those later).

Are you curious about launching your own community, or about how brands can best work with communities for mutual success? To help you get under the skin of this movement, I spoke to leaders from two of my favourite new healthtech communities: both of which happen to be among the fastest-growing groups of the year.

The new guard: NXGN UK

First up in the interview seat is Dr Alice McGee, Chair of NXGN UK. They launched in the summer and saw a massive influx of members immediately.

Please introduce NXGN in a couple of sentences. NXGN is a healthtech and biotech community connecting the people actually building the future of care: founders, operators, clinicians, and investors who like their science sharp and their chat human. Through our community, regular events, and the NXGN newsletter, we spotlight the bold ideas, messy realities, and real-world wins shaping what comes next in healthcare.

You had a huge influx of members when you launched. Why the sudden appetite? Honestly, it felt like we opened the doors on something people had been waiting for. So much of healthtech/biotech networking is either too fluffy or too formal. NXGN landed in the middle: operator-led, clinically literate, and actually fun.

Founders, clinicians, and builders were craving a space where you can talk trials, product, and funding in the same conversation, without dumbing things down or turning it into a pitch-fest. That mix of real talk, connection, and momentum is what drove the influx.

How do you keep members engaged and the numbers growing? We think about it less as “growth tactics” and more as “earning the right to stay in people’s week.” A few things we’re doing:

• The newsletter: We use it to spotlight members and surface what’s actually moving the needle, not just press releases dressed as insights.

• Member-led moments: We’re handing the mic to the community for “Ask Me Anything” and “here’s what I learned the hard way” sessions.

• Tight feedback loop: We constantly ask, “What do you want more/less of?” and then actually change things.

What is the Committee’s vision for the future? We’re building NXGN to be the home for people actually moving the needle. The vision is a globally connected, locally rooted community.

We want NXGN to be the place where you can pressure-test an idea with clinicians on a Tuesday, find a co-founder on a Thursday, and announce a trial to a tuned-in audience any week of the year.

Long term, that looks like NXGN as infrastructure: community, content, capital, and clinical insight under one roof.

How can brands and organisations work with you authentically? Authentic partnership means you show up as a thought partner rather than a passive funder. The best partnerships add clear value: helping our members go faster or learn quicker.

• Co-created events: Roundtables or workshops where your team contributes expertise and lived experience

• Content + insight: Collaborating on playbooks or deep dives that are actually useful (e.g., navigating pilots or reimbursement). No bland sponsored content here please!

• Talent + pathways: Creating visible routes for NXGN members into fellowships or roles inside your organisation.

Any lessons from the past 6 months? Two big ones. First, Curation > Scale. The strongest communities aren’t necessarily the biggest; they’re the most intentional. Second, Real talk wins. People don’t want innovation theatre. The unpolished, “here’s what actually happened” conversations build trust faster than any keynote ever could.

The Ministry of Healthtech

Next, I spoke to Jimmy Endicott, co-founder of the Ministry of Healthtech (MoHT), which just celebrated its first anniversary.

Please introduce the Ministry in a couple of sentences. The Ministry of Healthtech is the UK’s largest and fastest-growing community for aspiring healthtech leaders. We provide a space for talent to network with peers and industry veterans in a hierarchically flat, friendly, and supportive space.

You’ve had a stellar first year - podcasts, parties, partnerships and more. Was this planned? It’s followed the path we intended, just at a much greater velocity! We launched with a Christmas event last year, and when it sold out within a week, we realised we were answering an unmet need. Soon after, our socials hit 1,000 followers, and the podcast is on track for 10,000 downloads by the end of 2025. It’s been a case of nudging things in the right direction and letting nature take care of the rest.

How do you maintain the MoHT distinct personality as you scale? It’s been really important to know what we are and what we aren’t. At first, the essence was based on a conversation between two founders in a bar. As you grow, you have to define that so others can understand it. We’ve found classic brand definition exercises much more useful than trying to write generic “mission, vision, values” statements.

How can brands work with MoHT? We’re a community-led organisation, so an authentic partnership has to be a win-win. As we’ve grown, we are being approached by more organisations wanting to connect with our audience. This is where sticking to our brand values is vital.

We have a nice portfolio of channels now, so we approach partnerships on a bespoke basis. If partners invest in us, we have a responsibility to work hard for them: they deserve more than just sticking their logo on the bottom of a newsletter.

What is the Cabinet’s vision for the future? We’ve spent time aligning on where we want to go so that the community stays in the driving seat. Fundamentally, Ministry is about connecting people. But now that we have a good cadence, we’re asking: what else can we do? Whether it’s lobbying the centre for industry reform, supporting equity and diversity, or just doing little things to help independent workers who don’t have an office or colleagues.

Any advice from your year of community building? Act from your heart. We were surrounded by incredible people who didn’t necessarily know one another - we felt there could only be positive outcomes if we helped them connect. If you want to be true to that, you have to give some of your time to help others. If everyone does the same, only good can come of it.

The bottom line for comms pros

Why does this matter for us? Because the leaders of these groups are the new influencers.

These communities have created the spaces where the healthtech industry is actually networking, learning, making business decisions, and crowd-sourcing ideas. If your organisation wants to reach the most ambitious founders, investors, and decision-makers, you need to be where they are investing their time.

But a word of warning: these communities are not for sale. People join these groups for social value and because they’re tired of being bombarded with promotional content.

To cut through, you need to prove you are committed to helping the community thrive. Be a participant first and foremost!

If you’re interested in joining or working with NXGN or Ministry of Healthtech please reach out to Alice and Jimmy - and hopefully I’ll see you at one of their events very soon.

Not much space for bonus content this month, but I’ll shout out a couple of interesting things I’ve consumed:

👁️A slightly terrifying Guardian article about the proliferation of AI-generated deepfake TikToks and videos of doctors whose words have been manipulated to help sell supplements and spread health misinformation.

🤓One for the real PR nerds - a thesis paper written by Kimberly Oguilve Solís that draws on extensive research to present a structured framework to understand how media relations can support startup development and growth. I promise that reading this will help you win your next client!

🏃‍♂️‍➡️ And finally, a health comms treat on the PR Week podcast: Evie and Siobhan interview national treasure Joe Wicks and and Julia Bainbridge, partner at Freuds Group, who leads the health and behaviour change unit, about their recent public health campaign work and the shifting landscape of influencer comms.

So, this month, I’ve been rediscovering my love of ethnographic storytelling and learning about the powerful role it can play in health communications. The following interview with Nick Leon, an ethnography videographer, is definitely one of my favorite Substack pieces yet. I hope you find it as fascinating as I did!

Nick, who trained as a user-centred researcher in design, founded research and filming agency Naked Eye over 22 years ago. He describes his role as “bringing together ethnography and filmmaking to help organisations see and understand the reality of people’s lives”. Below, Nick explains his work, its meaning, and its impact, in his own words.

“The real-life behaviours and experiences of patients whether they are living with a rare or chronic disease is still relatively unseen. It’s incredible to hear some experts and healthcare professionals have never seen the reality of people with the disease they treat and how it really impacts their lives. My work shines a light on this.

“Ethnography is a way to study people. For decades ethnographic research, a qualitative research method with its roots in anthropology, has given organisations a way to understand the reality of the people who are their partners, customers, or end users. Ethnographers do this via observation, participation (walking in the person’s shoes), empathy, and by talking to the person about how they imagine their world.

“I spend time with patients in their home, on the go. Across different social situations, across different times of the day documenting their behaviour on film, making sense of what matters to them and how they see their world. Listening is a big part of it. Trying to make sense from their point of view, their motivations, frustrations.

“Like all of us, there are truths a person might feel but can’t articulate easily. Behaviour, context, language, culture, social norms - all offer a way into unlocking this.

“People don’t remember data and numbers. They remember human stories because they are relatable and engaging. They make audiences feel something. Video ethnography explains what numbers and data driven tools miss. They keep people’s real lives front of mind and when paired together both data and storytelling create greater trust and impact.

“Insight doesn’t come from measurement alone but from understanding the lives behind the data. Storytelling’s (and video ethnography’s) superpower lies in its ability to humanise data for stakeholders.

“My work helps comms and PR teams connect science to lived experience and to think in more human-centred ways. The value is in creating emotive, trustworthy content (stories, films, messaging) to support disease awareness and patient advocacy campaigns. Embedding patient-centred thinking across the organisation is also a big part of it.

“Projects that take you to different countries – particularly emerging markets or places that have distinct culture and relationships to heath - are fascinating for ethnographers and filmmakers. But equally I’m drawn to stories from anywhere that challenge assumptions.

“I once worked with a person that had spinal muscular atrophy. I filmed him in his home. Then a few weeks later speaking on stage at the World Economic Forum alongside the CEO of a Fortune 500 company. He wanted to be the first disabled astronaut to go into space. His sense and belief about himself, his ambition, what you can do with your life despite ‘obstacles’ is beyond inspiring. These experiences live and stay in your mind and change your perspective. So it’s not just about landing a message but challenging norms and convention. Those stories are always memorable.

“My advice for health communicators who want to tell patient, healthcare worker, or scientist stories in a more authentic and powerful way is always: spend more time with patients understanding their reality. Find stories that move you. Share them. Prioritise human connection and understanding real-world context over slick production or AI generic content. Use the learning and experience to shift your perspective, spark new connections, that change how you and others imagine the lives of people you want to learn from.

“It’s important that telling other peoples’ stories feels like a collaboration. Many patients say they don’t want their story to sound sad or downbeat, but instead hopeful and inspiring to others. So before a project begins, check your assumptions at the door and take time to ensure you’re telling their story in the way they want it to be told.

“I’m always deeply moved when people at the end of a project - whoever they are - tell me “Thank you for letting me tell my story”. It happens more than you might think. Filmmaking and ethnography, far from being intrusive, gives patients space and time to tell their unique story. The fact that comms agencies and clients can supercharge their reach gives them the impact they deserve.”

Huge thanks to Nick for sharing these reflections and advice - if you want to book a consultation with the Naked Eye team, reach out via email: nick@nakedeye.london

Media news

📰 The British Journalism Awards shortlist is out! Find the nominees and links to their articles here - some wonderful examples of the talent, persistence, bravery and creativity of UK journos.

📰 Another new tech media brand has launched, helmed by ex-TechCrunch editor Mike Butcher. Called ‘Pathfounders’, Butcher promises “informed reporting, analysis, and opinion on the top tech startups and VC firms across Europe, and their bridges to Silicon Valley” and a focus on “wider, under-reported, international tech startup ecosystem, from the Middle East, to Africa, Asia, and Latin America.”

November Listens

👁️ Have scientists created a bionic eye? BBC Inside Science

🚺 What can we learn from the Government’s new women’s health strategy? Healthtech Pigeon

Let’s Be Loud

⚡PR friends - are you tired of being stuck behind the scenes, never getting the credit for client successes and struggling to articulate the value you bring to the boardroom?

I wrote an article for PR Week this month calling for more ‘Loud PR’ - that means speaking up when our work has moved the needle, and using hard data to tell the story of the impact via as many channels as we can. Read it here, and let me know how you’re planning to put Loud PR into action this month.

Dates in my diary

🎤 OHT London: Where does health start (and stop)? Rethinking boundaries in a blurred system - and what that means for innovation and equity

📅 Wed 19 Nov 2025, 6:00–9:00pm

📍 Hale House, London

🎤 Women’s Health Innovation Showcase: As part of London Life Sciences Week, this showcase brings together founders, investors, practitioners, and industry leaders to spotlight breakthrough innovation in women’s health

📅 Thursday 20 November, 8:30 - 13:30

🎤 PRCA Members Christmas Drinks: this annual event is always a great chance to celebrate the end of the year and reflect on highs and lows with fellow PRs

📅 3rd December, from 6:00 PM

Labour’s manifesto promised “Never again will women’s health be neglected” but for those working to drive system and policy change in this sector, the battle to be heard and engaged with remains hugely difficult and frustrating.

Why? Because it’s a noisy, crowded campaigning space, understanding who to target and how is a seemingly impossible challenge. But we know that it can be done as demonstrated by some brilliant examples of women’s health advocacy work ticking all the right boxes.

One such example is CensHERship: a campaign group cofounded in 2024 by women’s health advocate Clio Wood and comms and marketing expert Anna O’Sullivan. The group aims to raise awareness of - and bring an end to - the digital suppression of women’s health content across social media and other Very Large Online Platforms (VLOPs).

Over the past year and a half, CensHERship has already achieved significant impact through proving and publicising the scale and consequences of digital censorship.

The group has gathered data, evidence and experiences that have been translated into whitepapers launched across online and broadcast media. They have also succeeded in forging powerful coalitions and partnerships that have brought policymakers to the table to ensure digital regulation addresses gender bias and recognises the public health and economic cost of this issue. CensHership have now started to apply pressure on social media platforms to stop their algorithms from treating women’s health content as inherently sexual or inappropriate.

I asked Clio to share some of her and Anna’s experiences from the first 20 months of growing their campaign, and to offer some advice for fellow women’s health advocates and campaigners looking to achieve rapid impact and attention from policymakers and media. An abridged version of their advice follows.

⚡Lesson 1: Data is your ammunition

Anna and Clio had both seen colleagues and health educators being gaslit by online platforms - their content removed for being ‘inappropriate’ and their concerns dismissed without response.

“We knew we had to form a collective and credible voice,” they explained. “So our first and most fundamental step was to build a bank of solid information.”

By systematically gathering data, evidence, and personal experiences, they could unequivocally prove the scale of the problem. This data-first approach became the bedrock of their campaign, earning them features in national newspapers, on BBC Radio 4, in women’s health titles and tech press, and even bringing in requests to participate in academic studies. This media traction, in turn, drove more people to share their data, creating a powerful cycle of evidence and awareness that, today, attracts campaign partners and financial supporters.

“If you haven’t got the data to back it up, how can you even have the conversation?”

🏛️ Lesson 2: Policymakers first, platforms second

One of the most surprising insights was who was willing to listen. Once they had built early relationships with influential people and groups in tech and women’s health, Anna and Clio found it far easier to engage with policymakers than with the tech platforms themselves.

While initial conversations with TikTok and YouTube were “nascent” and felt designed to placate them, other platforms like Meta have been completely unresponsive. Their strategy is now to use policy to create leverage.

“Once we get policymakers around the table, they will force the hand of the platforms to come and talk to us,” they say. By filing official complaints with bodies like Ofcom and the EU (through their digital services act), and by hosting roundtables in Parliament, they are creating pressure that the Very Large Online Platforms (VLOPs) cannot ignore. So: if the front door is closed, always look for a different way in!

⏳ Lesson 3: Play the long game and focus on resilience

For women’s health campaigners and communicators fighting algorithmic bias day-to-day, the advice is twofold. First, be wary of self-censorship. Using asterisks and code words may avoid the algorithm temporarily, but it perpetuates the idea that these topics are shameful and need to be hidden.

Second, don’t rely solely on social media. Build resilient, direct lines of communication with your audience, like a strong email list, that can’t be taken away by a platform’s policy change.

Above all, they stress that this is a marathon, not a sprint. The censorship of women’s health is a symptom of a much larger, systemic issue.

“This is about feminism. All social media platforms have been shaped by a patriarchal lens, and the algorithms have been fed with a traditional male perspective. We need to keep exposing them to female norms to rebalance the scales.”

Their ultimate message is one of persistence. This work takes energy and patience, but by building a foundation of data, applying strategic pressure, and never losing sight of the systemic root cause, momentum and change is possible!

Huge thanks to Clio and Anna for these insights - head to their LinkedIn page to find out more about supporting the CensHERship campaign.

If this interview has inspired you - please do register for the ✨ free ✨ online workshop I’m running with my Lexington colleague Rebecca Noël to help you power-up your policy-focused advocacy work. It’s geared towards the women’s health space, and perfect for people who want their comms and campaigns to have more impact, more quickly.(Thursday October 30th, 13:00 - 14:00, pre-register via Zoom).

🍼Campaign inspo…

In October, femtech company Elvie (working with creative agency Mother London) partnered with Eva Lazarus, artist and breastfeeding mother, to release a song and music video as part of their ‘Smart tech for smart bodies’ campaign. It’s different, it’s joyful, and it puts breastfeeding unapologetically centre-stage.

Media goings-on…

📺In September two tech founders announced their plans to ‘save’ the European tech media ecosystem with the launch of ETN, a daily live video podcast modelled on the hugely popular US show TBPN.

Their announcement went LinkedIn viral and generated an enthusiastic response from London’s tech and VC bubble, but will ETN succeed where TechCrunch, The Next Web and Business Insider UK have so recently failed? How will they monetise the platform sustainably? Most importantly, will ETN prove fertile ground for long-suffering healthtech PRs looking to land high-impact coverage for clients?! Watch this space 👀

I’ve been reading…

📚Code Dependent, by FT and former WIRED AI & tech reporter Madhumita Murgia: an ethnography of AI’s ‘humans in the loop’. Jumping from Bulgaria to Sheffield to Kenya, Murgia tells the stories of real people helping train algorithms or whose lives have been completely changed by the technology - for better and for worse. By peeling back the layers, this book exposes the reality of what an AI-mediated society means now and what it will look like in the future.

📰“There is a consensus that simply relying on conveying accurate information via leaflets and websites is not enough…”A scary and sobering Long Read from Denis Campbell in The Guardian on the epidemic of health misinformation fuelled by Trump, and the desperate attempts from governments and the WHO to hold back the tide.

🍻September event highlights:

• Battling through London tube strikes to The Health Foundation’s Annual Reception

• Networking from a cold plunge pool and finding lots of friends at THE FIX

• Weird and wonderful conversations with fellow healthtech nerds at the Future of Health’s autumn networking evening

• Flexing my healthtech product manager muscles at a full-day Women in Tech Hackathon in Shoreditch

📆In the diary for October:

• PRCA Global Health Group: The Next 10: Aligning communications with the three big healthcare shifts (sign up here)

• The Ministry of Health Tech Autumn Social (grab a spot)

For the first For Immediate Release, I’m focusing on a topic that intersects my favourite academic disciplines: anthropology, public health and communications. I was fortunate enough to receive advice for this article from a leading authority in the space - I know I’m going to be referring back to their words again and again to guide my own work. Every health communicator needs to read this!

Sexual health, personality disorders, incontinence, infertility, addiction, end-of-life care, eating disorders, chronic pain, suicide. These are the messy, painful, awkward, and complicated conditions silenced in public discourse, shadow-banned on social media, censored in the press, and banished from dinner table discussion.

Though health stigmas are invisible, their consequences are very real: GP appointments missed, treatment avoided, relationships fractured, and a crushing burden of shame. According to the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Communication1, stigma is the leading - but least understood - barrier to health.

The evidence tells us taboos are not random; they are built and maintained through communication. The language we use, the stories we tell, and the silence we keep all socialise us from a young age to recognise, judge, and ostracise

Diagram reference2

This gives health communicators a clear and urgent mandate. Working in partnership with healthcare professionals, patient advocacy groups, and other organisations, our role is to dismantle the cycle of silence and ill-health. We can replace misinformation with facts, bring tailored education to hard-to-reach communities, and design awareness campaigns that put the most difficult topics in the national spotlight. We can create platforms where people can share their experiences so others realise they are not alone.

However, navigating these emotionally charged territories requires skill, strategy, and empathy. We will come up against critical questions and challenges in our work, including:

• How can we design messages that promote positive behavioural change without inadvertently creating or perpetuating stigma?

• What factors make our audiences more resistant or vulnerable to stigma-inducing content?

• How can we create effective, trusted campaigns that dismantle existing taboos for good?

I put some of my own questions to the team behind Talking Taboos Foundation, a charity with a mission to unearth taboo topics whose unspoken nature isolates and prevents people from seeking help. Their work focuses on bringing these topics into the light, supporting those affected to communicate, and equipping the rest of society with the skills to break down stigma safely. They publish an annual Today's Taboos report, have developed a set of communications principles, and run a regular series of (excellent) events.

Below is an abridged version of the advice they shared with me.

[On their key considerations when communicating about taboos]

“Our aims for events and communications, in general, are rooted in practicality and value. What can people achieve by having more open conversations? What can they take away?

“We try to honestly and openly acknowledge the difficultly of having conversations about subjects that have been silenced for so long or hidden behind stigmatising rhetoric - that’s why we are doing this work! As part of this, we encourage people to "get comfortable being a bit uncomfortable.

“When working with taboo health topics, we’d urge fellow communicators to:

• Consciously widen the audience beyond the assumed people affected.

• Use proper and accurate language, ensuring you are not stigmatising or further exacerbating the taboo.

• Avoid imagery that perpetuates taboos, such as only showing the people assumed to represent the taboo, showing extreme distress, or showing hopelessness.

• Many people want to have these conversations but don’t know how to. When creating materials and resources, include practical tips on how to start dialogue or safely respond to topics.”

[On avoiding oversimplification in a clickbait-fuelled world…]

“We know that oversimplifying taboos can inadvertently reinforce the very stigma the Talking Taboos Foundation works hard to tackle. For that reason, we prioritise:

• Bringing in the voices of those with lived experience to bring taboos to life and help build empathy and understanding.

• Working with experts to ensure content is both factual and relevant.

• Staying true to the taboo at the heart of the matter: what is it that we are highlighting? A taboo subject holds various nuances. Keeping in mind who we are seeking to impact and what the key insight is vital.

• Using simple language and presentation of any data, explaining nuance in clear, concise terms.

“Importantly, we acknowledge that it's not always appropriate to talk about a taboo in a way that is attention-grabbing. Whilst sometimes, simple and impactful is the way to go, while in other scenarios, we need to take the time to explain important nuances”.

[On their approach to developing comms and events…]

“By creating our events and communications in partnership with experts, including those with lived experience, we ensure they're empathetic, safe, and impactful.

“This is especially important at our events, which we design with a taboo-informed approach to provide warm, welcoming, and honest spaces for conversations. A couple of things we do to ensure these spaces are empathetic and safe are:

• Providing resources for specific support services so they are easily accessed during and after the event.

• We provide a content note on what the discussion might look like when the event is launched and communicate it consistently until and during the event.

• Our safeguarding leads create a co-created risk assessment, often consulting experts by experience and profession.

• Our event host gives a warm welcome and shares several ways to keep conversations safe and on track, including:

  • Acknowledging that not everyone is ready to talk about the taboo.

  • Keeping shared experiences private and confidential.

  • Allowing space to ground ourselves before the conversation and decompress afterward.

  • Signposting a place to go for a breather without judgment.

  • Directing attendees to a staff member (safeguarding lead) for support or to simply sit with someone.

“The first time we host events on specific topics, we use a panel discussion format. This allows people to attend without feeling pressured to speak about themselves while still benefiting from hearing others share their experiences. It also provides role models and demonstrates how to engage with the topic in a thoughtful, sensitive, and nuanced way.

“We also work with other organisations on creating taboo-informed campaigns and communications from our position as taboo experts. We do this through our trading arm, Common Collective. One recent example is working with Cancer Research UK’s BowelBabe team on a campaign centered around encouraging people to talk about poo and smashing the poo taboo (read more about the campaign here).”

[On striking the right balance communicating with a vulnerable community and engaging with the general public...]

“Our research has shown that many more people are affected by taboos, or know someone who is, than we assume. We don’t divide between affected vs. unaffected in our work, as we believe it’s a full societal effort to break down taboos, and our focus is on the general public being better informed and better equipped to support those experiencing them.

“However, it is important to be careful about how and when to speak up, and where to acknowledge the privilege of being able to speak up and out.

“There is also a nuance between taboo-informed services perhaps needing privacy and being sensitively designed for taboos while attitude change happens. For example, sexual health should in the future become as normal as going to the GP with a rash on your arm. But while it's still a taboo, we need to create services that support people and meet them where they are. In a similar vein, we always encourage audiences to ask questions via our taboo box at events, whether anonymously or not.

“We know that designing services with taboos in mind benefits everyone, not just those affected, and we will continue to advocate for this.”

Huge thanks to the Talking Taboos team for sharing their reflections and advice with me. I can’t recommend their events enough - and they have one coming up THIS WEEK!

To mark World Suicide Prevention Day, the Talking Taboos Foundation is hosting a free event on Thursday 11 September 2025 (6–8:30 pm) at The Phoenix Garden, London.

This panel event will go beyond the general stigma around suicidal thoughts, focusing on how cultural taboos and expectations – from ideas of “strength” in male-dominated spaces to the pressures of resilience within Black African and Caribbean communities – can make suicidal thoughts especially hard to speak about. Free tickets are available via Eventbrite.

September Extras 🍂

☀️Content I’ve been consuming

Amanda Coleman’s latest Substack article explains the concept of radical authenticity in the context of crisis communications: “It is an approach that means an organisation is completely and transparently honest, and it does this when it is difficult, challenging, inconvenient or potentially embarrassing. In practice this means dropping the corporate facades and working to provide genuine updates and details with no careful choreography…” It’s certainly food for thought for anyone working in crisis comms!

☀️Reflecting on the month’s health comms stories

Martha’s rule, which lets NHS patients request a review of their care, is now in operation in every acute hospital in England. The campaign behind this, led by the family of Martha Mills, has has been an incredible example of how to run a powerful communications and engagement campaign that leverages media, mass public and political pressure to reach key stakeholders and ultimately secure policy change that actually gets implemented

☀️Reflecting on the role of PR

An FT feature on City PR firms’ ‘pivoting’ their service offering prompted me to reflect on the role of PR teams in today’s corporate environment

☀️Events highlight

• So far in September I’ve attended a breakfast event focused on the safe deployment of AI in healthcare at the London AI Hub, and the PRCA’s summer drinks mixer in Charing Cross.

• In the weeks ahead I’m looking forward to: The Health Foundation's Annual Reception, NXGN X ALETHIRA: The Launch Equation, THE FIX (the most fun healthtech ‘un-conference’ you’ll attend this year - get 20% off tickets with the code JESSFRIEND),The Future Health’s quarterly networking event,
  and hopefully more!

WELL DONE for making it to the end of a bumper edition 1 🙌

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