Three years ago, Baroness Tessa Jowell gave her powerful speech in the House of Lords recognising the need to improve brain tumour treatment, care and survival for all patients – something which the organisation has been working to achieve in her memory.
So, as part of the organisation’s campaign to recognise the delivery of outstanding care and treatment by NHS staff to provide above excellent patient care, it introduced its ‘Tessa Jowell Centre of Excellence status’ – and we were tasked with announcing the nine NHS hospital brain tumour centres across the UK that have been designated this incredible accolade.
Kicking things off, we created a powerfully moving piece of content highlighting what the Tessa Jowell Centre of Excellence status means, and how it ultimately aims to create universal equality in access to excellent cancer care throughout the NHS, wherever patients may be in the country. Along with working with the incredible internal team on teaser posts for the Tessa Jowell Brain Cancer Mission’s social channels, which received an overwhelming response from MPs who were keen to find out how they could help to support.
And then we took it to media. We had two spokespeople that could talk from experience on the subject; Tessa’s daughter Jess Mills and Professor Richard Gilbertson; the story told was incredibly moving and delivered the ongoing legacy set out for the Mission.
On launch day, the team led the way with an emotive interview on Sky News, which was followed by a suite of broadcast hits on the likes of ITV London and BBC London, and regional broadcast titles too, securing fantastic pieces on stations such as BBC Scotland and BBC Look North. Regional papers supported the story featuring the nine Centres of Excellence, including Chronicle Live and Yorkshire Evening Post.
The coverage results were brilliant, but most importantly, we helped to recognise the fantastic work of the NHS and put brain cancer on the map for MPs, petitioning for additional funding to support people affected by this.
