Traditional methods used to promote educational resources to healthcare staff have many limitations. Social media may greatly enhance efforts to increase the visibility of resources and allow targeting of specific groups and communities. Our project aimed to disseminate key clinical messages from the National Tracheostomy Safety Project to those caring for patients with tracheostomies or laryngectomies. We commissioned feedfirst Ltd, an external media company to design educational material and devise a marketing strategy. We developed short films to communicate recommendations from the safety project and used Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and LinkedIn to deliver these resources to our target users. We recorded 629,270 impressions (the number of times content was displayed) over a 12-week campaign in early 2018. Our YouTube channel registered a six-fold increase in views and total watch-time during the course of the campaign as compared with the previous year, with around two-thirds of views across all platforms from peer-to-peer sharing. The majority of views were on mobile devices.
The National Tracheostomy Safety Project secured a series of completive grants from the Health Foundation in 2017 to make our resources more accessible and easier to follow. We have also received several private donations from individuals to help us in our work, notably from the Narula family in 2018. Donations and grants are used to improve our resources and their dissemination, and we are extremely grateful for both the awards and the donations we have received.
You can link directly to our YouTube channel to see all of the videos. You may use them for your own training an requirements with appropriate permission.
The Health Foundation is an independent charity committed to bringing about better health and health care for people in the UK.
The paediatric videos were filmed at the Royal Manchester Children's Hospital in 2018 during routine anaesthetics, ward care and during home visits. As with all of our videos, the staff, parents and patients were fully informed about the filming and have given their consent for the videos to be used by the National Tracheostomy Safety Project. The adult videos were filmed in 2017 at Wythenshawe Hospital, Manchester. The children in our videos attended a special premiere in 2019 to thank them for their participation.
