Novartis UK celebrates double win at the 2020 Communiqué Awards

This year’s Communiqué Awards was hosted virtually and live-streamed on 2^nd July celebrating excellence in a broad range of communications categories. We won the award for Excellence in Corporate Communications for Internal Stakeholders and were delighted that ApotheCom won the Innovation in Scientific Communications award for their dermatology project in partnership with Novartis UK. In addition, Rock Unlimited was highly commended as a finalist in the category for National or Local Education Meetings for their work with the Novartis ophthalmology team. Find out more about these achievements below:

Winner of Excellence in Corporate Communications – Internal Stakeholders

In November 2018, we announced that we would be moving our UK headquarters from Frimley, Surrey to White City in London. ­The purpose of the relocation was to be closer to our customers and partners within an emerging life sciences ecosystem at this West London location. The objective of the project was to ensure that as many employees as possible continued with the business and made the move to the new HQ in London. The Communications team worked alongside the London 2020 relocation project team and Hanover Communications to develop a strategy to inform, support and inspire employees throughout the consultation process and physical move.

To create excitement about the new location, the team created a White City pop-up in the Frimley office and appointed move ambassadors to ensure employees could be involved as much as possible in the process. Success was measured by the fact that ‘communication’ was consistently highly rated in employee surveys and more than eighty percent of employees made the move to the new office in London. The Judges of the Communiqué award commented that, “Novartis produced an enjoyably creative relocation project. It shows good understanding of using language to resonate with the audience, creating empathy during a difficult period of change. It had tangible impact, demonstrated by the high level of staff retention. Achieving way above what was expected!”

Winner of Innovation in Scientific Communications

We were delighted to see ApotheCom win the Innovation in Scientific Communication for the work we did together on the ‘Hands-On’ dermatology project. The multifaceted, innovative and immersive learning programme was created with an expert panel and the objective was to enhance the ability and confidence of dermatologists in assessing patients with psoriasis for signs of psoriatic arthritis. Hands-On was showcased at ten major dermatology congresses through symposia and booth activities and at smaller local events led by medical scientific liaisons. The meetings included patient experience videos, disease education quizzes, practice-based experiential examinations via an augmented-reality app, and prosthetic hands with an accompanying video guide of how to perform an examination.

Over three thousand healthcare professionals were educated by the Hands-On programme, which has the potential to change practice globally. In addition, a Hands-On app was launched in the App Store to expand this success and to reach a wider audience. Communiqué said, “The judges felt that this programme brought innovation by digging deep for solid insights which when acted upon, had the possibility of really changing clinical practice at the point of delivery and thereby ultimately improving outcomes for patients. Relevant feedback and data was collected from each event and the programme was incrementally improved showing a focus not only on innovation, but on building up this in the future.”

Highly commended for Excellence in National or Local Education Meetings

Rock Unlimited worked with Novartis and twelve leading UK medical retina specialists to develop the ‘Visualise’ educational programme for ophthalmology clinicians that was highly commended in its category. The purpose of this meeting was to address unmet needs relating to clinical and service challenges in the NHS and the effective and efficient use of optical coherence tomography (OCT) imaging. The meeting was supported by a retinal image management platform developed by Moorfields Eye Hospital that allows integration of full image stacks from all the major OCT manufacturers. This management platform was able to reflect real-world practice and therefore allowed interactive exploration of scans associated with individual case studies. The interactive meeting was attended by 158 clinicians who shared real-life case studies with ninety percent of the attendees acquiring new knowledge about OCT. The Visualise educational meeting will be rolled out regionally in 2020 to reach a wider audience and to continue providing this educational tool.

July 2020 | COR20-E077