Spire Healthcare is recognised across the UK as one of the leading health institutions, offering services to over 800,000 individuals across their 39 private hospital locations and 8 clinics. With the introduction of the COVID-19 virus, Spire had to swiftly react with big changes to their processes and procedures across all areas, from consultation to discharge. One of the key challenges however, was to ensure that these changes were communicated to the attendees of the hospitals, as they wanted to provide confidence that all these changes were made with their safety as a priority.
The problem; how can Spire communicate their COVID-19 changes to make people feel safe about attending their hospitals?
Our Approach
Ultimately with our approach, we had to consider the current COVID-19 restrictions. We knew we wanted to include voices of real people to create an authentic video, but our goal was to also create high-quality marketing content. And so we came to the conclusion of obtaining video diary interviews from hospital attendees who have had first-hand experience of the hospital changes, to talk about them candidly from the comfort of their own home with the combination of quality video production to add crucial visual context. These would include key details of what respondents would be talking about, such as parking, in-car swab tests and entrance temperature checks.
As these COVID changes were recent, realistically the pool of potential individuals that we could talk to were small, and so rather than resorting to a lengthy recruitment process from an external agency, we worked with Spire to find a handful of different people who were open to talk about their recent experiences. We often create a task guide or questionnaire for respondents to film themselves in their own time, with our VPI producer always at hand with close contact throughout the process to make sure everything is as easy as possible, with only the best content created.
The final consideration is that due to recommended filming restrictions, we kept to a crew size of two, a camera operator and producer. This ensured a more ‘fly-on-the-wall’ approach when it came to filming, to add to the authentic style we were going for while also keeping the cost down.
The Result
With the video living front and centre on the Spire Healthcare website for onlookers but also creating social edits for multi-platform publishing to followers, our video was well received. Particularly the cross-method approach of ‘hearing not seeing’ the core video diary content allowed the perfect combination of genuine and authentic responses, paired with added cinematic visual context.
On Facebook alone our videos have generated 14k+ views with heartfelt comments such as these below, confirming the wonderful changes they have made, always putting the attendees wellbeing first.
“I had an appointment today and I have to say it was outstanding. ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐” – Claire
“I had an operation and a day stay at Spire Cambridge yesterday. It was 5 ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ and I’ve just completed your survey to say this! 👍🏻” – Ali
“Amazing practitioners xx kind and caring professional and empathetic x from the meet and greet at the door to reception and everyone along the way to the medical practitioners x just amazing xx” – Gillian
