The Campbell Academy Business Blog

Some HR resources

Because what's in your head is in your head (and not in anyone else's head), communication with your staff, your team, and your patients is really, really important.

Putting down once a month or at whatever frequency you like, a list of what's going on and what's happening helps keep everyone involved, helps keep everyone engaged and inspired, but it also allows people to put their hand up and say 'I would like to help with that' or 'I would like some of that'.

In the first instance, you might want to talk to your patients monthly.

A long while ago, I realised that the best thing I can do to talk to patients monthly is just to tell stories about what's happening and hope that people come towards us who think like us and share our values.

An example of this month's patient newsletter that I sent is here. We've had an extraordinary response: people coming into the practice and saying thanks very much and sending us direct emails saying thanks.

In my opinion, this is the best, most genuine way to speak to people, so I hope you agree.

The second is how we speak to referring GDPs. This is a copy of this month's Referring GDP newsletter, which is pretty much the same story.

What pain would I be in if I were a GDP, and how would I like The Campbell Clinic to help? It's just telling stories around that and actually engaging with people to show them who you are and walking your own talk.

The next thing I do is send a monthly letter out to my team. This goes out on a Slack platform; it's just a summary of what's in my head and what's going on, things that we're working on and things we're doing.

The next thing is our 3 monthly staff newsletters compiled by the marketing team at the practice. You can see it here. This is an extraordinary bit of work. I'm so proud of this, and I never had anything to do with it; I only saw it when it dropped into Slack, and then I could open it.

Feel free to grab these, copy them, or come back to us if you've got any questions about how to build them.

Communication is key because, as Chris Barrow said to me many years ago, 'all problems exist in the absence of a good conversation'.