Are you flagging on the hamster wheel of perennial news stories? Do you resort to biro acupuncture to stay conscious in meetings? Is your life force being drained by national awareness days?
by Steve Watkins
It is hard to stay motivated when faced with the same round-robin of activities year in, year out, and everything starts to feel like Groundhog Day.
If you find yourself in the creative doldrums, maybe it is time to have some fun and make stuff up. That’s right. Don’t sit there like a pot of Kimchi waiting to be added to someone else’s recipe.
The NHS has more wiggle room than you think to be playful.
Our medical library at Northwick Park Hospital proved an unlikely source of inspiration with its assortment of curiously titled periodicals like Brain and Experimental Science.
As a result, we made a series of tongue-in-cheek videos which were well received on social media receiving several thousand views
Weird science - Discover LNWH libraries - YouTube
The service’s under-used Fiction Room provided another opportunity for some DIY communications.
We approached several authors asking to appear in a short video reading a passage from one of their books. This ended with a call to action to visit the library.
We had our share of rejections but I answered the phone one morning to find best-selling author Frederick Forsyth on the end of the line offering to help. He was later joined by crime writer Lynda La Plante, popular psychologist Richard Wiseman and Ashley Hickson-Lovence,
We suddenly had a lovely cost-free campaign - aside from the train fare to Mr Forsyth’s stately pile in the depths of Surrey - which we tied in with a staff competition to win free signed copies of the authors’ books.
Why stop there when we were having fun?
Operation Pot Plant offered a free indoor plant to every office space in Ealing Hospital. Kew Gardens agreed to record a video message encouraging staff to go green as well as donating several pairs of free tickets for another staff competition showing it never hurts to ask.
Then there was the time I had to explain why I had asked an 80-year-old interviewee to pose in her swimsuit during a series of interviews with older people still passionate about exercise, or to security why my then nine-year-old was running around the hospital in her PJs.
What next? I plan to submerge myself in a reservoir as part of an on-going social media campaign encouraging patients to return unwanted walking sticks to hospitals.
It will be a visual take on the Arthurian legend of the ‘Lady in the Lake’ holding aloft a walking stick instead of a sword.
It should be epic - if the park ranger or terrapins don’t get me first.
Steve Watkins works as a media officer at LNWH Trust in London
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