Getting thousands of veterans the healthcare they deserve, for the Royal College of GPs

The Background

The Royal College of GPs’ (RCGP) Veteran Friendly practices programme supports GP surgeries to identify, support and refer veterans for best health outcomes. However, with reports from the British Medical Association, the Kings Fund and the RCGP highlighting the immense pressure that GP surgeries remain under post-Covid, momentum around signing up to the programme had slowed dramatically.

Prior to Evergreen being commissioned, the number of practices getting accredited each month was in the low single figures.

The Target Outcome

After we demonstrated effectiveness with a campaign in November 2021 that increased the number of accreditations by 260% in one month, Evergreen was commissioned to repeat the feat in November 2022.
A clear target was agreed:

• Objective: Trigger 90 GP practices to get accredited in November - this would set a new monthly record and pass a key milestone

The Evergreen MERTO Insight

Our research, which included an audit of the GP Workforce, a review of published studies on veteran healthcare, a COM-B behavioural analysis of our target audiences and Power Interest assessment to inform prioritisation, uncovered a number of key insights:

• While previous campaigns by the RCGP had focused on their primary audience of GPs, they comprise just 26% of the practice workforce 

• Veterans are more likely to experience long-term health problems and have different needs to the general population, yet most practices don’t have a system to identify them and veterans are less likely to access support if they feel they won’t be understood

• Previous campaign messaging and imagery had been very military-focused. It was possible that while this appealed to GP staff with a military background, it could alienate some audiences.

The Evergreen MERTO Strategy

Our idea was:

Create an emotionally powerful campaign that provokes a realisation among health and care professionals that the impacts of serving in the Armed Forces are often not obvious and veterans can be hard to spot - while at the same time appealing to the wider practice workforce by using real stories of veterans and staff in an integrated campaign that encourages staff to sign-up.

Our campaign involved the following steps:

1. We developed a Messaging Framework around the hero line: ‘The impact of service isn’t always obvious’, which was backed by key insights from the research phase

2. We briefed and collaborated with our design partners at Everything’s Fine to produce the high impact image and supporting images illustrating the diversity of military personnel. Critical feedback on the imagery and campaign messaging was gathered from GPs and veterans via the RCGPs ‘clinical champions’, with the adjustments that followed helping us to make it more compelling.

3. We developed a press release using the timely hook of Remembrance Day, alongside statistics sourced from our literature review, shining a spotlight on the issue of ‘undisclosed health needs’ and warning that many veterans are going undetected and may be reluctant to seek support if they think GP practice staff won’t understand them.

4. We initiated targeted media relations, focusing on outlets that we scored as High Power in our analysis. We focused on driving a combination of news coverage, interviews and viewpoint articles across a mix of mainstream, NHS system, GP, nursing and practice manager media.

5. We developed a Digital Toolkit containing draft copy and campaign imagery that could be used across a range of social and online channels and shared this with health professional associations who support General Practice staff. 

6. We also produced social and newsletter content for the RCGP and NHS England.