NHS Employers Flu Fighter Award for South Tees trust

South Tees Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust’s communications team picked up the Digital and Social Media gong at the NHS Employers Flu Fighter Awards 2017.

Judges said the team were the “standout winners” – despite numerous entries from Trusts across the country, following a hard-hitting photo campaign, which involved real-life patients and staff.

Dr Penttinen, who judged the digital and social media award, said: “In addition to having a clear social and digital media presence with high quality videos, educational and motivational messaging that achieved the target results, this team had proactively embarked on engaging into a conversation with staff on an intranet discussion forum and with email voting buttons.

“They had also developed a countdown banner onto the website.”

Amanda Marksby, head of reputation management at South Tees Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, said: “This is well-deserved recognition for the hard work the team put into helping make this year’s flu campaign such a success within our organisation. The campaign really got staff and members of the general public talking with its use of hard-hitting posters featuring real patients.

“The award also recognises the great work done by the Trust’s wider ‘Flu Fighter Team’ including our occupational health and flu champions, who worked tirelessly to vaccinate our staff and promotes partnership working between healthcare workers and communications professionals at its very best.”

Danny Mortimer, chief executive of NHS Employers, which runs the national flu fighter campaign, said: “This is very inspiring local work by staff who go the extra mile to keep their colleagues and patients safe.

“When this flu fighter campaign started in 2011 only a third of frontline NHS staff in England were having these vaccinations and now it is almost two-thirds. That is a huge improvement over a relatively short time in the life of the NHS, so really all these flu campaigners are winners.”