Nursing is a severely understaffed profession across the NHS, with an estimated 44,000 unfilled job vacancies in the UK. To combat this, the NHS is attempting to bring more medical professionals into these positions by appealing to a new demographic that has frequently been overlooked.
At Mullenlowe I worked as a UI designer on the ‘Return to Nursing’ initiative. The campaign targeted Nurses that have left their nursing career for retirement, maternity/paternity leave, or to retrain. To address the chronic shortage in the workforce ‘Return to Nursing’ aims to fill these vacancies by appealing to a sector that doesn’t require extensive training, and have already proven themselves valued NHS professionals.
The campaign sits within the wider 'WE ARE THE NHS' campaign, championing a sense of comradery within the workforce.
Retired nurses had been previously overlooked as a potential demographic to connect with, and often lumped in with potential or active student nurses. To approach this demographic, we would need to create platforms and a user journey that was fit for their professional level, life stage and prior knowledge of the NHS. Addditionaly, the relevant resources were buried deep in student nursing portals with terrible signage, no brand association to the NHS, and irrelevant tools.
We needed to engage with retired nurses and appeal to them specifically, instead of relegating them to the same user group as potential trainee nurses. This involved providing a clear and succinct journey for this user group to interact with, providing them with specific resources and motivations. The visual journey this involved would need to align ex-NHS professionals with the NHS brand, respecting their history with the organisation and referencing the positives of the workforce they would be returning too. As part of this, the team and I devised a simple sign up process and email nurture journey, giving users the resources they require to return to the nursing workforce.
We are signing up
The sign-up hub was designed to lift resources and initiatives out of their existing environments, and place them together in a convenient, branded digital space. The page combined new brand photography, NHS assets, success stories, faqs, and a simple sign up process. This page existed as part of a wider NHS Nursing portal overhaul.
Onward
After signing up users would be served one of 7 nurture email chains depending on the details they provided. This would be delivered incrementally over the course of 3 weeks to avoid information fatigue. These resources gave users the tools and contacts required to get back into the field of nursing depending on life stage, experience level, and circumstances. I worked with CRM content team to create a highly flexible system that accommodated a variety of content, and still perform across a wide range of email clients and devices.
The initiative was praised as part of the wider ‘WE ARE THE NHS’ campaign, and received 15,000 sign-ups at the time of writing. The initiative highlighted the requirement to lift necessary resources out of nebulous portals and create accessible routes to tools for past, present, and future NHS employees. The email template system is being adopted into the wider NHS communications system because to its flexibility and brand alignment.
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