Building referral networks, digital reach and community impact from the ground up
Client/Employer: Nuffield Health Plymouth Hospital Role: Healthcare Account Manager (GP Liaison) Services: B2B healthcare sales, GP education, digital content strategy, community outreach Context: Post-Covid recovery period
The Brief
When I joined Nuffield Health Plymouth Hospital as Healthcare Account Manager, the NHS and private healthcare sector was emerging from the disruptions of the Covid-19 pandemic. The role, sometimes known as GP Liaison Officer, sits at the intersection of healthcare sales, relationship management and marketing. The core objective was to build and strengthen relationships with GPs and healthcare professionals across the local health economy, driving patient referrals to Nuffield’s private consultants.
It should have been a fairly traditional field-based role. The reality required a lot more creative thinking.
The Challenge
Face-to-face GP education events, a cornerstone of the Healthcare Account Manager role, were not possible in the immediate post-lockdown period. These events are vital for building relationships with GPs and keeping healthcare professionals informed about the services and consultants available at the hospital, so finding an alternative wasn’t optional.
There was also a technical barrier: the hospital’s firewall prevented recordings of Microsoft Teams events from being saved or shared externally, meaning any GP or healthcare worker who missed a live session had no way to access the content afterwards.
What I Did
Solving the Firewall Problem and Building an On-Demand Content Library
Rather than accept the limitation, I found a practical workaround. I downloaded Teams recordings locally, edited them using Veed.io, adding a professional voiceover and branded title pages to top and tail each video, and uploaded the finished content to Vimeo. I then shared the links directly with my database of healthcare professional contacts.
The response was immediate and enthusiastic. GPs and healthcare workers who had missed live sessions could now access high-quality, professionally presented educational content at a time that suited them and it enabled the service to truly be inclusive, allowing GP’s who were working parents to access CPD training at a time which fitted with their familial commitments. What started as a workaround became a content strategy.
Encouraged by the uptake, I extended the same on-demand model to patient education events, giving patients access to trusted health information in a flexible, accessible format.
Going Hybrid Before It Was Standard
As restrictions lifted and face-to-face events became possible again, I didn’t abandon the digital model, I expanded it. My database of healthcare professionals had grown to include contacts from as far afield as the Isles of Scilly, and I was determined they shouldn’t lose access to the education and training I was providing.
I engineered a live-streaming solution that allowed remote attendees to join face-to-face events in real time, while the recordings continued to be edited and shared on-demand afterwards. This hybrid approach, now common across many industries, was something I built from scratch, with limited resources, because it was the right thing to do for the professionals I was serving.
Over time, this created an extensive catalogue of on-demand healthcare education content, accessible to a growing network of GPs, nurses, and healthcare workers across the South West.
Growing the Social Media Presence
Alongside the education programme, I managed Nuffield Health Plymouth’s social media channels, developing content and campaigns to support both referral objectives and patient engagement. During my time in the role, I doubled the following on both Facebook and Instagram, growing a genuine community of patients, healthcare professionals and local people engaged with the hospital’s services.
Nuffield’s own central marketing team only provided a selection of 8 social media templates to share across our channels, so using the brand guidelines and our own cache of approved images, I created enough to rotate every month and have a full content calendar. I also shared content about our own teams and my proudest moment was the 12 days of Christmas video which I made with all of the hospital teams and scheduled to run daily, increasing every day until the final post where the whole 12 days of Christmas song played through. I am nothing if not dedicated to upskilling and finding ways to be creative.
Events & Brand Presence
I represented Nuffield Health Plymouth at a number of high-profile community events, including an exhibition stand at the Royal Cornwall Show, a significant regional event with strong footfall from across Cornwall and Devon, Sail GP, an annual international sailing competition and co-hosted several Regional Symosiums, ranging from 50 attendees to 170 attendees in one day. I also organised internal staff celebrations for both the Queen’s Platinum Jubilee and the King’s Coronation, strengthening team culture and internal engagement during a period of recovery and change.
Early in the role, I reintroduced the GP newsletter, initially produced as a PDF and distributed via email as per my predecessor’s instructions. It seemed a sensible way to keep healthcare professionals informed, but when I connected the campaign to Mailchimp to track performance, the data told a different story: almost nobody was clicking on the attachment. The newsletter was being sent, but it wasn’t being read, making the whole exercise largely ineffective.
Rather than continue with a format that wasn’t working, I rebuilt it from scratch as an HTML email, with clear buttons, defined calls to action and a layout designed for easy scanning. The difference in engagement was immediately measurable, and for the first time, I had meaningful data to work with, open rates, click-throughs, and a clear picture of what content was resonating with GPs and healthcare professionals.
One thing which kept coming up was the weight of having too many communications, so I also created a private Facebook group for the GP’s to join which would also contain key information from the newsletters. If I couldn’t reach them via email, I would make sure that I could reach them when they were scrolling social media.
I applied the same thinking to the internal staff newsletter. By migrating it to an HTML format, I made it more visually engaging and, crucially, reviewable, so we could understand what staff were actually reading and responding to. Internal communications at the hospital became a meaningful part of my remit, and I took it seriously, treating staff as an audience deserving of the same care and clarity as external stakeholders.
Beyond communications, I also sponsored the meetings of the South West Practice Managers network, a valuable forum for building relationships with the people who often influence GP referral decisions. And working collaboratively across the Nuffield brand, I partnered with the General Managers of the Nuffield Plymouth Health & Wellbeing Centres to cross-promote gym memberships to our event attendees, creating a joined-up offering that added genuine value for the healthcare professionals and patients we were engaging with.
The Handwashing Programme — A Community Initiative That Went National
Perhaps the project I’m most proud of from my time at Nuffield Health was one that began as a community idea and ended up being adopted as a national initiative.
I developed and led a community outreach programme in Plymouth, targeting children in the city’s most socially deprived areas with a simple but powerful message: how to wash your hands properly. The thinking behind it was practical and compassionate, reducing illness in children means fewer missed school days and fewer parents having to take time off work to care for sick children. It’s a small intervention with a wide-reaching impact.
The original target was to reach 700 children. My team and I reached 1,200.
The programme was so well received that it was adopted and rolled out nationally to other Nuffield Health hospitals across the UK, a result I’m enormously proud of, and a reminder that community-focused thinking can sit very naturally alongside commercial healthcare objectives.
Results at a Glance
| Achievement | Detail |
|---|---|
| On-demand content library | Built from scratch; accessible to healthcare professionals across the South West |
| Geographic reach | Database of HCPs from Plymouth to the Isles of Scilly |
| Social media growth | Doubled followers on Facebook and Instagram |
| Handwashing programme target | 700 children |
| Actual reach | 1,200 children in Plymouth’s most deprived areas |
| National impact | Programme adopted and rolled out to Nuffield Health hospitals nationwide |
| Events | Royal Cornwall Show – 3-day event, Sail GP, Queen’s Jubilee party for 260 staff, King’s Coronation for 260 staff. |
What This Demonstrates
This role required me to operate simultaneously as a relationship manager, content creator, digital strategist and community programme lead, often solving problems that had no existing solution. The results reflect what’s possible when marketing and business development are approached with genuine curiosity, flexibility and care for the people being served.
Whether you need support with healthcare marketing, GP liaison strategy, social media growth or community engagement, I bring the same approach to every client: understand the challenge, find the smartest path forward, and measure what matters.
Get in touch and let’s see how I can help you!
