Communicating messages about death is always challenging, but Leeds City Council decided to take the reins and work with partners across the city to help residents face their fears. Communications officer Debra Kerr and Ageing Well Officer Carole Clark explain how collaboration helped people to find the right words to tackle this difficult subject.
In 2014 a local health needs assessment was carried out in Leeds which identified that there was no city-wide education campaign dedicated to helping people prepare for the end of their lives. Although it’s not a subject that people always want to think about, it is something that affects everyone, so it was a need that we had to address.
Around the same time, research by the national organisation Dying Matters revealed that 60 per cent of people die in hospital, despite more than 70 per cent of people saying that they would rather die at home. We wanted to develop a campaign programme that helped people to plan ahead, explained the practical things to consider and outlined the choices that people had about their end of life care. We also wanted to help medical and social work professionals to feel more comfortable talking about things like this with patients and families.
The plan and execution
Although overall responsibility for developing the programme belonged to the council, it was an entirely collaborative effort. The Clinical commissioning groups (CCGs) provided funding via the Palliative Care Strategy Group for a three year education, campaign and awareness programme and we began by identifying partners who could contribute to the development of activities. We directly involved colleagues from CCGs, the NHS, local hospices, charities and academic from the University of Leeds. It was easy to bring people together as end of life care is a topic that all partners were involved with but recognised the need for extra support.
We decided to align our activities to the national Dying Matters objectives so that we could work within a clear structure and framework and focus localising agreed messages rather starting from scratch. This greatly helped partners from across a number of different organisations work more effectively together and helped us to keep our local branding consistent with the national movement.
We spent the first year of our partnership collating the information that each organisation already held around end of life issues, to ensure that we could provide the public with consistent information. We also spent a lot of time on researching what people in Leeds knew about topics such as do not resuscitate, making a will and power of attorney so that we could target our messages. This phase included city-wide surveys and focus groups with particular communities to better understand their needs and the messages that would have most impact.
Once we had sufficient insight we engaged a design agency to help us develop visuals and messages for communities across Leeds. We used a poster campaign and social media marketing to help people to understand the key issues associated with preparing for the end of life, particularly the practical things. We also featured a number of blogs from people facing the end of their lives, or directly involved in the care for end of life patients to help bring the human stories to the practical information.
To help encourage people to talk about their concerns about death we arranged a number of free events in the city centre where people could come in ask questions or find out information. We had ‘death cafes’ for people to talk about their concerns, as well as information on arranging your financial affairs or making funeral plans. We themed the most recent event around the issue ‘everything you wanted to know about death but were afraid to ask’ to help people feel comfortable and reassure them that there were no silly questions.
The impact
We had positive feedback from the people who attended our events and our poster campaigns and information packs were particularly well received by medical professionals, who said that it had helped them to have practical conversations with patients. The biggest impact of a collaborative style of working was that we were able to reach a far wider audience than would have been possible if any one organisation had taken sole responsibility. Working together helped us to broaden our impact and fund more targeted research activities to make sure that we were investing in activities that would really help people. It also helped to ensure that the messages circulated about end of life preparation and care across Leeds were consistent and endorsed by partners across the city. This helped to increase their credibility.
Why it worked
Mirroring the priorities of the national Dying Matters campaign definitely helped us to focus our activities, meaning that we could start working straightaway. All of the organisations involved in the partnership also came into the group with a real willingness to learn and an enthusiasm for improving information across Leeds. Everyone was focused on the end message and the impact on our audience, rather than promoting their individual organisation. This meant that we were truly able to work together and significantly improved both our relationships and the quality of the information we could share with our communities. This partnership approach has been so successful that we are continuing to meet regularly and we are welcoming new organisations into it all the time.
Lessons learned
As people often have specific questions about preparing for the end of their lives face-to-face events work particularly well for giving people the bespoke information they need. The first event we ran was very good, but we wanted to attract more attendees so this year we have made it even bigger and included a wider range of stall holders. This includes artists, performers and charities. There’s even some fun elements such as a cardboard coffin that people can colour in to make everything a bit less frightening. We’re looking forward to continuing to develop these activities over the coming years.
Want to know more?
For more information please contact Debra Kerr, communications officer, Leeds City Council or Carole Clark, ageing well officer, Leeds City Council.