For those working in healthcare comms and patient experience, the below “top tips” from Northumbria should help you advance your own engagement strategies.
1. Stop broadcasting and start conversing
Ross highlighted that in 2026, digital engagement isn’t enough. While Orlo provides the tools to listen online, he advised that you should also be having conversations in person. The trust runs “Northumbria Community Cafes,” where senior leaders go out into neutral community spaces to meet people where they are.
- Tip: Don’t wait for the public to come to your formal board meetings, go to their spaces instead. Seeing “the whites of people’s eyes” builds a level of trust that an email simply cannot replicate.
2. The “waiting with purpose” philosophy
Feedback from Northumbria’s patients showed a recurring theme: it isn’t just the length of the wait that causes distress, it is the lack of purpose during that wait. In response, the trust introduced a front-door streaming service at its emergency hospital.
- Tip: If a wait is unavoidable, give it a narrative. By telling a patient, “You will wait four hours, but here is why, and here is what we are looking for,” you reduce anxiety. Even better, Northumbria now offers “scheduled” urgent care, allowing patients to go home and return the next day for a set appointment rather than sitting in a waiting room for 15 hours.
3. Simplify clinical communication to improve accessibility
The trust realised that many of its clinical letters were written in a way that was difficult for the average person to digest. This wasn’t just a communication issue, it was a health inequality issue. If a patient cannot understand their appointment letter, they are less likely to attend or follow clinical advice.
- Tip: Audit your templates. Northumbria used “lay panels” (members of the public) to rewrite clinical letters for brevity and clarity. If your letters require a medical degree to understand, you are accidentally building barriers.
4. Close the loop with “you told us, we did”
Nothing kills community engagement faster than “survey fatigue” or the feeling that feedback is being shouted into a void. Jo and Ross are adamant that every piece of engagement must “close the loop.”
- Tip: Start every engagement session or update by referencing the last one. Use a simple “You told us X, and we did Y” format. If you couldn’t do what they asked because of funding or national policy, be honest about that, too. Transparency builds more trust than a hollow promise.
5. Provide actionable, real-time data to the frontline
Jo manages one of the largest patient experience measurement programmes in the UK, but she knows that data is useless if it stays in the boardroom. They provide ward-level “real-time” dashboards every four weeks.
- Tip: Ensure your data is “actionable.” Busy nurses don’t need 50-page reports on trust-wide sentiment, they need to know if the patients on their ward last Tuesday felt their pain was managed.
6. Overcoming the “Amazon effect” and the trust deficit
The webinar touched on a difficult reality for the NHS in 2026, as Ross puts it the “Amazonification” of public expectations. Patients are now used to instant results and one-click service. This makes the traditional four-hour Emergency Department target feel like an eternity to younger generations.
Furthermore, there is a national “collapse of trust” in large institutions. Ross noted that the British Social Attitudes Survey recently showed satisfaction at record lows. However, by localising their data, Northumbria found that 80% of their community still trusts their local hospital.
- Tip for Comms Teams: Use your local positive data to shield staff from negative national headlines. When staff feel they are doing a “bad job” because of the news, showing them that their actual patients appreciate them is vital for morale and retention.
7. Think about the future
With potential changes to NHS legislation regarding the Council of Governors, Northumbria is already planning for a more dynamic future. They are moving toward a model of “Patient Safety Partners” where members of the public are trained to sit on quality panels and hold the trust to account in real-time.
They are also focusing heavily on “poverty proofing” their services, ensuring that the cost of travel or the ability to access digital tools doesn’t dictate the quality of care a patient receives.
