Excellence in Communication Through Creative Execution - New for 2018

Summary of work

The NHS is complex, formed of many organisations with different roles and responsibilities. Making sense of how it works can be challenging, even to those who work within it – let alone to patients and the public.

The King’s Fund set out to create the clearest explanation yet for a broad audience of policymakers, health professionals and patients of how the NHS in England works. The Fund decided to create an engaging animated video that would make people smile and that they would want to share. The creative concept for the video centred around a ‘crazy wall of clues’ as seen on TV detective programmes and included in-jokes for health experts while providing a clear explanation for a more general audience.

The resulting animation, ‘How does the NHS in England work? An alternative guide’ exceeded all its targets. It received more than 50,000 views in its first four weeks, with outstanding feedback from patients, professionals and political audiences. It was also used as a springboard for developing further free and paid-for products explaining the NHS, including a paid-for one-day conference attended by several hundred people.

Judges' comments

The King’s Fund produced an exceptionally well-crafted and well-scripted video which managed to simplify the very complicated – the structure of the NHS in England today. It is such an authoritative piece of work that the Department of Health itself now uses it for new staff inductions!