One word aptly describes what people are facing. Pressure. This came up in nearly all the interviews we conducted.

Pressure in the NHS is certainly not uncommon, but this feedback felt different. Gone is the attitude that ‘it’s high pressure but we’ll get through it’, replaced instead with a mindset of ‘it’s high pressure, how will we ever get out of this’ and ‘can I really keep doing this?’.

What can you do?

Can you alleviate this pressure? No. But you can avoid adding to it.

Let’s be honest, being mindful of the pressures people are under is a basic prerequisite of any engagement with the NHS, but it is more important at this time.

Every engagement needs to be seen through the lens of – ‘this person is under huge amounts of pressure, am I alleviating it or adding to it’.

As well as being aware of this, there are also practical steps you can take. Try to eradicate time-wasting activities, they only add to the pressure people are feeling.

Some of the main bugbears people mentioned were:
- Unnecessary visits – Don’t visit them if you have nothing new to say. Meetings take time to arrange and attend. Just exchanging pleasantries for an hour isn’t going to go down well in the current climate.
- Unsolicited emails – Reduce unsolicited emails. Inboxes are full enough.  
- Co-ordinate engagement – Multiple people contacting you from the same company, about different topics, within days of each other, is really frustrating for HCPs. Being more joined up in how you engage with HCPs will be more efficient from their point of view.

Please get in touch to understand how Opus can support your business to engage with the NHS in 2023. We have the expertise, experience and creativity to find that unknown insight and translate it into a deliverable idea.

These insights are compiled from interviews conducted in December 2022 with a range of NHS healthcare professionals working in secondary and tertiary care (including nurses, consultants and pharmacists).

They will hopefully help to inform how people working in Pharma can engage with the NHS in 2023.