Ripping up comms templates, even when they have liberal boundaries, is never comfortable but she believes that storytelling has to be more responsive to hook on to the emotive neurons that can influence health behaviour.

D for Disruption fits neatly into Page & Page’s matrix of Discover, Define, Develop, Deliver, which is designed to generate compelling insights and empathy and guide relevant content.

“Discovery is really important to us. We need to know what actually matters to HCPs and patients, what are their pain points, rather than our perception of their pain points,” said Bates. “How can we speak a common language that shows them that we understand and might have something to offer that will be able to improve their situation or alleviate their problems?

“Patients must have a voice and feel their views are part of the solution to an issue they have to contend with every day. If you get audiences involved at an early stage, they feel a level of ownership towards the content and the brand because they have contributed to it. They have become part of the storytelling themselves because they have helped craft the message.”

The annual £300m bill the NHS pays due to medication non-adherence is a prime example of the impact of fractured communication – a story that doesn’t resonate with the very people it is designed to help.

This astronomical figure is a constant in healthcare and is effectively a billboard proclaiming the lack of connection between some messaging and the public, a disconnect that should and could be addressed with greater conviction and intelligence.

Patients have arguably evolved at a faster pace than the pharma industry and the healthcare infrastructure that delivers care. They demand more and have bought many of their consumer expectations into the healthcare sphere. As the stakeholder, they have never been so important. Developing a safe and efficacious drug is table stakes – how does its delivery fit into everyday life? What does the accompanying support package look like? And the list goes on.

Page & Page and Partners recently held an advisory board where a key topic of discussion among the pharma industry delegates was the involvement of patients in drug development – as early as trial design.

“By involving patients appropriately, we could learn so much. There are lots of factors that need to be taken into consideration when working with patients but it is hard to imagine how outcomes can truly be improved without a better understanding of what it is actually like to live with a certain condition.”

Traditionally, pharma has been scared to ask patients for honest input, but this tide is definitely turning.

Paul Hunt, associate creative director at Page & Page, added that listening is a performance instrument that is often under-tuned in healthcare communications.

“You have got to listen properly and that’s what we try to encourage all of our clients to do. Listening to each other and thinking about what people are saying and what they want is rewarding. We talk about imagining the world through the eyes of someone else and considering what is going on in their lives and what drives some of the decisions they are making.

“That applies to everything we do and how we appreciate and consider our colleagues. What we encourage clients to do is what we do.”

He added: “Marketing leads obviously want to get all their product features out there first, but messages need to be more considered if they are to resonate with audiences – HCPs or patients. We encourage our clients to speak to people, listen to them, show they have understood them and then you can get the product features mentioned. We do recognise that this needs some bravery.”

A recent campaign underscored the approach with Page & Page and Partners’ listening and understanding phase generating stronger messages than the client envisaged. “We had to use some dark language to reflect what the patients were experiencing,” said Hunt. “The approach knocked people off their daily autopilot with some clinical specialists in the therapy area saying it was the most realistic depiction of the disease state they had seen.

“The client was brave and went for it because it recognised the need for something to stand out to create positive patient outcomes.

“We can really start changing perceptions if we all think about the end user a bit more.”
Page & Page and Partners is a growing company and its Media Lab facility interrogates traditional communication and behaviour beliefs through patient insights and research. Its latest report probed the pandemic’s tectonic impact and concluded: ‘Strong partnerships with shared agendas will be pivotal in pushing the industry towards using patients’ experience to set the pace of the industry’s therapeutic advances.’

Bates added: “This has been a transformative period and I think we need to harness some of the bravery that we’ve all found within ourselves over the past 18 months: individually, as families, as organisations, as a global community, and as an industry. It is not a time to be meek.

“It’s not easy to be brave and having been brutally ripped from our collective comfort zone in recent times, being brave may not necessarily come easily, but the alternative is to continue doing what we’ve always done and that is unlikely to change behaviours.
“We need to encourage each other to ‘open our minds and imaginations’.
“There will be challenging times ahead but there are also great opportunities. It is time to be brave and to seize them.”