Make the most of Q & A to reiterate your message

Media Friendly delivered two, well-received, sessions at the NHS South Central Communications Conference at Basingstoke Hospital's Ark Centre last week.

The two sessions, delivered by former BBC Health Correspondent Andrew Carapiet to communications professionals from the NHS, were "Presentation Skills" and "Crisis Communications".

Invited by Kevin McNamara of South Central Strategic Health Authority, the sessions were attended by a full house of twenty delegates each. Presentation Skills The Presentation Skills course included an innovative module on how to make the most of your final twenty minutes the Q & A session at the end of your Presentation.

While most organisations leave this bit to chance, we prefer to focus on it as an opportunity to reinforce the key messages given during the main presentation. So each question (and therefore each answer) is an opportunity to link back to one of the key "take-home messages" which you so painstakingly prepared in the main body of your presentation.

We use a simple Media Training tool to help presenters make the most of every single second of the valuable time they have been allocated to making that vital presentation.

Crisis Communications

We know that most communications professionals already have a good grasp of Crisis Management (or Issues Management if you prefer) within an NHS which does seem to lurch from crisis to crisis.

So what we offered in this short snapshot session were new ideas – most of which you will not find in any PR textbook or Crisis manual. Fifteen years of working with the NHS in Communications has taught us that doing all the obvious things will only get you so far.

So we prefer to concentrate on some slightly more "edgy" ideas harking back to key principles of the Public Sector, such as Partnership Working, to come up with some new ideas to combat that consistently negative news coverage which does plague some PCTs, SHAs and Hospital Trusts.