MullenLowe Group UK and NHS England Spotlight Patient Stories to Inspire New Nurses

MullenLowe Group UK has today launched We Are Life-Changing Careers, a multi-channel campaign designed to drive nurse recruitment for NHS England. 

The campaign forms part of the ‘We Are The NHS’ recruitment drive, which ran for the first time in 2018/19 and has seen nursing applications increase from 85,240 in 2019 to 117,285 in 2022. This year, it aims to inspire a new generation of nurses by using real patient stories to provide an honest and inspiring account of daily life working in the NHS, encouraging young people to see nursing as the exciting, fulfilling and life-changing career that it is.

The campaign comprises two films, featuring the real stories of patients. These are dramatically brought to life through the use of patients’ own social media posts and footage recorded by family members during their time in hospital and recovery.

MullenLowe Group UK supplemented these brave and inspiring moments with fresh footage, featuring real nurses alongside the two patients whose stories we are following. Angles, lighting and props were all matched to the original social media content to create seamless films and highlight the impact made by the nurses.

The campaign is informed by qualitative research among students and career switchers. This reiterated the caring nature of prospective nurses, but also demonstrated their appetite to learn and grow professionally in their careers. It also revealed that most people have no idea about the huge variety of specialist nursing roles from A&E nurse, to ward nurse, to pain nurse, to teenage cancer nurse, and many, many more.

We Are Life-Changing Careers responds directly to these insights by demonstrating the enormous impact that nurses can have on others, whilst simultaneously growing and developing professionally in any number of directions. 

The multi-channel campaign will run across video-on-demand, cinema, social, radio and digital audio, interactive quiz, website, CRM, PR and partnerships.

This is the fifth year of the campaign and the first work out of the agency since re-winning the account in the statutory review that took place earlier this year. 

Ian Hampton, lead campaign manager at NHS England said: “We Are Life-Changing Careers is the fifth instalment of the ‘We Are The NHS’ platform. The campaign this year focuses on what our nurses get out of a career in the NHS - that a nursing role in the NHS won’t just see them having an extraordinary impact on patients’ lives, it can do the same for theirs too. We are delighted to continue our relationship with MullenLowe for a fifth year. For the last four years our campaign has contributed to significant year-on-year increases in the numbers of students starting Nursing undergraduate degrees. We are very proud of that, and hope that the latest iteration of ‘We Are The NHS’ will continue to have a positive effect on nursing application numbers.”

Lucy Taylor, chief growth officer at MullenLowe Group UK said: “At MullenLowe Group, we’re all about driving tangible progress for organisations –  and our work with NHS England exemplifies this ethic. NHS England needs great people to continue providing the truly life-saving service it does. We’re hugely proud of the part we play in attracting these people to the organisation.”