Designing the HSJ winning campaign – Only Order What You Need (OOWYN)
I’m thrilled to say that the OOWYN campaign has won the HSJ Award for Medicines, Pharmacy and Prescribing initiative of the year! It's a great honour to be recognised for the hard work that our team has put in over the past year.
For those who may not know, OOWYN is a medicines optimisation campaign that uses positive logic to create behaviour change around repeat prescription ordering.
Our goals were to:
· empower patients to take control of repeat prescription ordering
· curate a positive messaging environment to ‘Only Order What You Need’
· design a repeatable campaign that has the confidence of system partners
· and reduce repeat prescription requests by 2%.
The OOWYN campaign was a true team effort, and I'm grateful to have been a part of it. We had a talented group of individuals who were passionate about making a difference to medicines across Dorset and working with general practice and community pharmacy. From the initial brainstorming sessions to the final campaign, everyone was dedicated to creating something that would truly resonate with our target audience.
One of the most challenging aspects of this project was figuring out how to create a positive tone to communicate Only Order What You Need. Something that didn’t give our audience ‘loss aversion’ as we know, this can have the opposite effect on behaviour change. We wanted to create a campaign identity that would be met positivity, rather than with worry. To accomplish this, we focused on using bright, positive colours that were modern and used in an accessible way. Linking the creative back to some of our key audience motivators. With little nods around our audience and purpose throughout the design.
Another challenge we faced was figuring out how to effectively communicate the message of the OOWYN campaign with its audience and build their trust in our messaging. We knew that we needed to create an identity that was easy to understand and accessible to a target audience of mostly 65+. But also, consistent across all communications and campaign touchpoints. To do this, we focused on creating a clear, concise message, with strong visual consistency. Applying this into our campaign toolkit and selecting the most appropriate channels for the campaign. And, using this in a way that would resonate with our target audience and build campaign awareness at every touchpoint.
We managed to achieve our goals and so much more. We can say that 65,152 repeat prescriptions were not ordered as a result of this campaign. If we estimate that each of these prescriptions saved a low average of 1 minute of time, from prescribing, dispensing, ordering, checking...we can then say we have saved 1085 hours of healthcare time. This sentiment has been reflected in feedback from primary care colleagues and have felt the difference on the ground. We have seen a cost reduction in repeat prescriptions of £475,00 and 295 tons of carbon dioxide equivalent emissions avoided.
One of the great things about OOWYN is that we were able to share the editable campaign materials across England with other NHS organisations who could then benefit from this work. The campaign has now successfully launched in other areas.
Overall, winning the HSJ Award is a huge accomplishment for our project team. It's a testament to the hard work, dedication, and creativity that we put into this project. We hope that the OOWYN campaign will continue to make a positive impact on medicines waste across England and we're grateful for the opportunity to be a part of this important work and share it far and wide.
