The Star Award for the Rising Star in Healthcare Communications

Summary of work

Since leaping into the industry straight out of university, Laura seized opportunities to work on an assortment of exceptional programmes and quickly progressed across five levels in five years, commanding respect from colleagues and clients alike at a relatively young age. From contributing to the growth of boutique agency Virgo Health through to its acquisition, Laura moved into well-established networked agency Hill+Knowlton Strategies and is now part of a close-knit start-up team at GCI Health. In her role as Account Director, Laura heads-up integrated communications and advocacy initiatives. She is someone who really understands the basics and sees them through brilliantly, but operating in this entrepreneurial set-up allows her to add that next level of critical skill by experimenting with the increasingly complicated interplay (and conflict) between creative, digital and conventional communications. She helps determine what such integration looks like and, vitally, how such efforts can help improve patient access to services and medicines. Laura’s passion and excitement about harnessing tools intelligently and imaginatively to meet the challenges of healthcare communications is particularly apt given the extraordinary environment we’re operating in; a perfect storm of immense restriction coupled with the most flexible and powerful means of communicating we’ve ever had.

Judges comments

During a strong presentation Laura’s sense of creativity was clear. She showed good lateral thinking and exudes gravitas with a cool, authoritative presences. There’s a maturity in her beyond her years and she demonstrated great curiosity in her work, having done some great stuff so far.