We connect the dots between health and life to create communications with impact.

Bringing  healthcare to life

About Us

Our Services

A winning strategy is simple to understand and execute. Finding that simplicity is the hard part.
We help clients re-think their direction, interrogate complex problems and offer fresh thinking to ensure their strategy lands well with stakeholders and delivers on its promise.

Strategic counsel

Campaigns that push boundaries drive people to change their behaviours and attitudes.
By bringing together a strategy rooted in audience insights, a spark of creativity and executional brilliance, we create bold, omnichannel disease awareness campaigns that make waves and result in positive change.

Disease awareness and public health

It’s no longer enough to just listen to patients and understand their needs. Patient collaboration and co-creation must be designed into the plan from start to finish.
New approaches that involve patients in the development, design, and delivery of healthcare innovations mean they’ll be adopted by the communities that made them.

Patient engagement and advocacy

Improving patient outcomes requires high-value medical education that makes a lasting impression. 
To have long-term impact, we must make data and opinion meaningful by understanding their consequences within the medical landscape and the patient community.

Medical education and scientific engagement

We understand that employee satisfaction has a direct impact on company performance, because that’s how we run our business.
Whether your company is going through a change management process, or you want to launch a new initiative or recognise achievements, we have the know-how to get your teams engaged.

Internal communications and employee engagement

We build long-term brand loyalty and shape company reputation for the better. 
We do this by understanding the environment, exploring ways in which we can initiate positive action and identifying opportunities for collaboration.

Brand and franchise communications

In our technology-infused world, no campaign is complete without a degree of online activation. 
Whether it’s building a website, developing a digital strategy, or creating content that resonates across platforms, CHC can help you approach the online landscape with confidence.

Digital and social campaigns

As the volume of content we consume every day increases, our attention spans shrink, and trends pass more quickly. 
We can help you find the right space and words for your story, so that your message is seen, heard and actioned by the audiences that matter to you.

Media relations and storytelling

Our Team

As the health of our team drives the health of our business, we tried ‘No Social Sundays’ for our second challenge in our 10 challenges for 10 years of CHC series. Did we succeed in avoiding social media every Sunday for the whole of October? Well, not exactly. But here's why we’re not ashamed to admit this. 
The team had very different approaches to this challenge. Jess – the only one to succeed – set a Sunday morning reminder on her phone each week. As for the rest of us… well, we struggled. Scrolling through social media has become so ingrained in our daily lives that we often found ourselves mid-scroll without even realising it. And, as Candice honestly admitted, some of us didn’t even try to avoid indulging in this pleasurable pastime. 
At the end of the challenge, we asked our team to reflect on whether social media has a positive or negative impact on their mental health. Here’s what some of the team had to say:
“Instagram can be great; it enables me to keep up to date with my favourite music artists, clothing companies and my close friends and family. However, Instagram naturally promotes comparison, a hallmark evil of social media. In a podcast I listened to recently, they suggested pausing every time you reach for your phone and go to open Instagram. Pause and take note of how you feel…it is very rarely when you feel good. You will often do it when you feel stressed, anxious or stuck at home with no plans and a bit of FOMO (fear of missing out). I find this is the cause and catalyst of feeling bad about myself, so I have dramatically reduced my use of Instagram.” – Will 
“I think both [positive and negative]. I use it to communicate with my friends, watch cute animal videos and keep up to date with pop culture, the news, and even politics sometimes (I’m ashamed). But there is definitely a toxic side to it, such as beauty standards, the ‘addictive’ nature of it, and of course the studies showing how it has impacted attention spans.” – Georgie 
“It depends on who you follow! I remember I used to be absolutely enraged by this influencer I followed on social media – there was nothing “wrong” with what she said or did, and I obviously never commented on her posts, but for some reason, they really got to me. I would sometimes spend 30 minutes of my lunch ranting to my husband about her life. I then realised I had the choice to simply unfollow her. And presto, she was gone.” – Candice 
Realistically, social media isn’t going away any time soon - it’s part of our society and the work we do, but this challenge gave us the opportunity to pause and reflect on how it’s impacting our lives. Overall, self-awareness was the most useful outcome of the challenge. By becoming more aware of how we use social media, we can reap more of the benefits and fewer of the risks. We can choose to let social media empower us, by reminding ourselves that we have control over what information we consume. 
So, whether that’s avoiding social media for a set number of hours or days per week, unfollowing things that impact us negatively or using it purely to connect with people, our team is taking steps to change the way we use social media. 
Perhaps failing this challenge and becoming more aware of what does and does not make us happy wasn’t so bad after all?

News

Challenge Two: No Social Sundays

With a few of our team on holiday and some struck down by illness (well, that was their excuse for getting out of the walk!), six members of our team courageously tackled the 10 miles from Vauxhall to Tower Bridge and back. Completing the loop in under three hours! Whilst spending your Friday night walking around in the rain might not be everyone’s cup of tea, as we’ve said before – we like a challenge. 
Fuelled by tea and biscuits at the start line, the joy of our Canadian-raised teammate (Candice) discovering the joys of Toffee Crisps, and Roland’s outrage that Freddos have yet again changed shape, we set off. Spirits were high, which meant it was only natural that it started pouring with rain the minute we passed the start line. There was no going back… we had set ourselves a challenge and we WERE going to complete it. 
Luckily the rain didn’t stick around for long! Despite some members of the team – who shall not be named – asking ‘are we there yet?’ at mile three and another couple – who shall also not be named – missing a turn, we powered through with witty repartee for entertainment. Well, I say witty, but I’m ashamed to report that at one point, our conversations turned to where the best place was to hang washing out in our houses, so perhaps it’s fairer to say it was a long three hours…. But the medals were worth it and the sense of achievement even better. Not to mention the BBQ and glass of fizz at the end! At CHC, the health of the team drives the health of our business, and it was great to get some exercise together, challenge ourselves (mentally and physically) and try something new. Here’s to the next challenge! Watch this space…<figure><img src="https://d33q76zddxsi8i.cloudfront.net/Untitled-design-36.png" alt="CHC team" /></figure>

Challenge One: 10 Miles for 10 Years

But as explained so well by <a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/brianscudamore/2020/01/31/when-is-the-right-time-to-start-a-business/?sh=6cd2793e486b" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Forbes</a>, here’s the thing: There’s never a right time to start a business. There will never be an ideal moment. There will always be reasons to put it off. And so, it comes down to this: you have to create the ‘right time’. Because only you can make this happen – and if you’re waiting for the perfect moment, you just might be waiting forever. But how do you create this set of conditions that make it possible to make your dreams a reality? 
Well for me, creating the right conditions meant three things: 1. Having a family with faith in me – that I could do it and would be happier for it. 2. Having clients who valued me – with real confidence that I could compete with their current agencies (some of them very big!) and deliver great results. 3. Having a remote team of freelancers supporting me – trusted colleagues that I could partner with and grow with as the business evolved. And I must have done something right, as my family, and some of my first clients and remote team members are still with me today!
The challenge of starting an agency is one thing, the challenge of maintaining a successful agency for over 10 years is quite another! It’s certainly been a journey and of course, there have been ups, as well as some downs, along the way. Looking back, the main highlights have been the great programmes we developed and implemented with amazing clients alongside inspiring healthcare professionals that were rolled out all over the world. I feel immensely proud of what the team has achieved over the last decade, as well as what lies ahead as we continue to grow. To all those clients, partners, members of the team past and present, and my family, a massive thank you!
As we’ve been thinking about how best to celebrate 10 years as a successful independent healthcare communications agency, the team came up with the idea of doing 10 challenges to celebrate the 10 years we’ve been in business. Challenges that push us out of our comfort zone – some just a little, and others quite a lot. Either way, they’re all designed to bring us together, do some good and create some memories. 
So, keep your eyes peeled for our first round of challenges over the coming months and if you have any bright ideas and want to put us to the test, send us an idea for a challenge at <a href="mailto:hello@clarkhealthcomms.com" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">hello@clarkhealthcomms.com</a>.

Team insights

It’s our 10th birthday! Founder and Chairman Jeremy Clark explains how it all started

We were lucky enough to have Rosie and Hatixhe join us for the week as part of their school’s dedicated work experience programme. They came to us bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, ready to find out what it’s like to:
1. Work in healthcare comms 2. Be part of a central London-based agency 3. Work a 9-5 day 4. Make the difficult decision of either Pret or Wasabi for lunch 
The CHC team was keen to provide a well-rounded insight into the work we do and the difference we try to make with it. A chock-a-block calendar of activities that featured interactions with each of our team was put together, covering every aspect of our day-to-day responsibilities and an insight into what we’re currently working on and our client mix. The ladies were brought into the thick of it from day one, helping with research for some of our projects, including finding women’s health social media influencers, researching the population demographic mix in Liverpool to aid an upcoming stakeholder interviews project, and supporting our internal marketing projects. We also gave them the opportunity to live out their London office dreams – fancy lanyards ✅, Starbucks in hand ✅, and the opportunity to dip into the free biscuit stash whenever they liked ✅.
“Our favourite part of the week was learning how to carry out research tasks and reflecting on how much we learnt about different conditions such as heavy menstrual bleeding and routine adult vaccines. We really enjoyed finding out how we can use social media to help understand different conditions and what it’s really like to live with them.” - Hatixhe and Rosie.
If you’ve been around long enough and been to many a networking event in our industry, you will have heard people say, “I ended up in healthcare comms by accident”. This is a well-known trope, but at CHC, we’re trying to change this. We want to inspire the next generation of communicators and help them identify that this is the industry they want to be in and plot a path to it.
“During the week, we got to do both research and creative thinking. This enabled us to understand our personal strengths and start to understand the different types of jobs within healthcare communications and what we think we might want to do in the future. Being in the office was a really important part of the experience as it allowed us to understand all day-to-day things no one tells you about – how people at different levels interact, how the team speak to clients and suppliers and how many cups of coffee everyone drinks!” - Hatixhe and Rosie.
Both Rosie and Hatixhe were a great addition to the CHC team and provided great learnings for all of us. With their departure, we look forward to welcoming more budding young communicators to the CHC team in the future.
If you’re interested in doing work experience with us or an internship, please do reach out and contact us at <a href="mailto:hello@clarkhelathcomms.com" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">hello@clarkhelathcomms.com</a>. We’d love to hear from you.

CHC Work Experience: Helping create the next generation of healthcare communicators

Jessica Lowrie joins CHC with over eight years of experience in the healthcare industry, both in-house and agency, and will focus on key accounts in oncology, internal communications and patient advocacy. Having recently moved from Vancouver, Canada, where she managed the Global Marketing Communications for a leading clinical diagnostic laboratory, Jessica will also be responsible for leading the omnichannel workstream for CHC. Also joining the team is Emily Coppen, with over six years of experience delivering healthcare communications and patient advocacy programmes in the UK and globally, alongside successful agency culture development projects at her previous agency HAVAS Just::. Emily will be leading key accounts in vaccines, women’s health and internal communications, as well as driving CHC’s marketing team, where she will utilise her patient engagement, creative content development and in-house experience.
Kirsty Somerscales, who joined the agency in February 2021, has played an instrumental role in the ongoing evolution of CHC. Kirsty’s contribution to new business wins, mentoring the growing team, and leadership of client accounts in change management, telehealth, and vaccines, earned her promotion to Senior Account Director in March 2022. With this promotion, Kirsty has joined the CHC Management Team and will be providing input into the agency’s strategic direction alongside leading the internal people workstream.
“I’m super pleased to welcome Jessica and Emily to the team. They both have the talent, experience and dedication that has become synonymous with our team here at CHC, and they bring new ideas that will stretch us and help us grow,” commented Siân Hurst, Managing Director, CHC. “Together with Kirsty’s well-deserved promotion, we will continue to develop as an agency and do what we do best – bring healthcare to life.”

Team updates

CHC strengthens its senior team with two new hires and a promotion to support continued growth

Occasionally, we do really mean it, but most of the time, particularly at work, we say it out of habit. It’s become synonymous with saying hello and opening a conversation.
While the intention behind the question is innocent, the way we answer it can affect us profoundly.
I know from experience being a busy MD that when people ask how I am, my default is to say, “I’m fine”, “I’m ok”, or “I’m all good” in my usual cheerful voice.
However, many years ago now, I learnt that saying “I’m fine” without properly thinking about my answer, isn’t always helpful – either to myself or those around me. It resulted in me internalising stress and becoming ill. And it resulted in my colleagues feeling guilty because they thought I was ok when I wasn’t.
You’re probably thinking, why did she do that? How stupid. But it’s not that simple. Being a strong, intelligent woman and successful MD doesn’t make me immune from making mistakes. I thought I was ok, albeit tired, under pressure and incredibly busy, until I really wasn’t ok and then it was too late. The damage was done and my body and mind needed time off to heal and recover.
I’ve learnt a lot over the years, but one of the most important, perhaps simplest things has been not to default to the autopilot language of “I’m ok” and “I’m fine”.
I passed on this learning to someone in our team recently and it worked. We agreed to only ask the question “how are you?” if we were prepared to give and listen to a proper answer. We also banned the words “I’m fine” and “I’m ok” to force a different type of conversation between us – thanks to Neil Crump for the training on this.
The impact was significant. She had to really think about the question and how she felt, and I had to really listen to what she was saying and what it meant, good and bad. We also implemented a rating system for each day, whereby a one meant she was having a tough day, to a ten which meant she was having a good day. It compelled her to think about what had happened throughout the day and to assess the sum of the day’s parts. We then unpacked ‘the number’ to delve more deeply into the good and bad, and put strategies in place to mitigate the number dropping on future days.
While we don’t use this technique all the time, it helped us both navigate through a busy period and is a tool in our back pockets for whenever we need it.
It’s such a simple skill that I wish I’d known about earlier in my career. So, to recognise <a href="https://www.mind.org.uk/get-involved/mental-health-awareness-week/">Mental Health Awareness Week</a> (9-15 May 2022) this year, I’ve challenged our team to try it out for themselves.
For one week, we’ve banned the words “I’m fine” and “I’m ok”, in search of more meaningful answers. I hope that sharing this technique with the whole team will help us stay true to our core value which is ‘the health of our team drives the health of our business’.
If you feel like trying it with your work colleagues, I’d love to hear the results!

I’m fine, I’m ok – the masters of mental health disguise

Looking back, I applied for the job at CHC because I wanted to work in a small, fast-paced agency that would give me great exposure to a variety of work. The reality exceeded my expectations - not just in terms of day-to-day tasks, but in terms of the unexpected opportunities available and incredible exposure to all aspects of agency life.
Here’s my top three unexpected opportunities as a JAE:
1. Being involved in conversations about all agency planning so soon after starting. Contributing to the future direction of the agency, from our hiring and training strategies to our growth and new business goals, has given me incredible exposure to the nitty-gritty of how an agency works
2. Working closely with senior team members. On one project, I worked solely with Siân, our MD on a research project for cell and gene therapy. Working so closely together was a great opportunity for us to get to know each other and for me to accelerate my professional development
3. Contributing to three new business pitches (and winning two 😊). I’m not just rolled-out for the presentation as a token junior team member, but I’m involved from start to finish. Being part of discussions about strategy and being actively encouraged to contribute is an opportunity I’ve loved
In addition to learning on the job, there’s always time dedicated to training which is very important to me, especially as I don’t have a background in healthcare or science. CHC offers both external training courses, such as the ones provided by the Healthcare Communications Association (HCA), and internal training where another team member or expert teaches us about a new area or idea.
Joining a small agency meant that I quickly got to know everyone and settled in quicker than anticipated, despite starting remotely. Because of the nature of our work, we chat and message each other pretty much all day, so my first few weeks were the opposite of isolated. Over the last few weeks, we've been slowly returning to the office for 1-2 days a week. For those that want to return to office life, we've been co-ordinating our days together, which mixes things up mid-week and often leads to post-work drinks.
All in all, over the past year I’ve gained so much knowledge, not just from a day-to-day skills perspective, but from a wider agency perspective as well. The cherry on the cake for me, was being promoted to AE in my first year! If you got good vibes reading about my first year and are looking to start a career in healthcare communications, get in touch with me today as we’re recruiting for a new JAE.

Bringing the JAE role to life - insights from Polly

A few weeks ago, I discovered a Ted Talk by Tim Ferriss on how defining your fears, rather than your goals, could help make good business decisions. As a self-confessed perfectionist wanting to make an impact in my new role, it appealed to me. It also appealed to the agency, as CHC is in a period of growth following three consecutive pitch wins. My job is to ensure that the business grows happily and healthily for our team and our clients, and making good business decisions is central to that.
As an experienced agency leader, I’m used to setting goals. But fears, well that’s a bit different and sharing them with the whole agency… it was a first for me! Anyway, I went for it. I sold it in to Jeremy our MD who loved the idea and we then ran a session for the whole agency where myself, Jeremy, Nadine our finance manager, and Candice an Associate Director shared our fears about growth.
Now, the key thing about this exercise is to surface the fear and then focus on the solutions, which can all be captured on one simple slide using the headings below:
1. Define your biggest fear in relation to your business right now
2. Identify how to prevent it happening
3. Identify how to repair things if it does happen
4. Consider the benefits of success
5. Consider the costs of inaction
The results were amazing. By talking about our concerns alongside our ambitions for growth, we were able to re-distribute responsibilities, agree some ground rules, make some important hiring decisions and prioritise refreshing our agency benefits package and training programme. All this will ensure that we continue to keep our current and new clients happy, and that our wonderful team feel happy, healthy and engaged in the journey as we grow.
The key learning for me and other members of the senior team, was recognising that what we fear doing, asking or saying, is very often what we most need to do to achieve success and avoid bumps in the road. Next week, the rest of the team get to reveal their fears and solutions to us.
So, don’t be spooked. Fear setting isn’t a trick, but a practical technique to help you make good business decisions. Watch the 13 minute video <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5J6jAC6XxAI">here</a> and see if it could help you. We’d love to hear if it was successful.
“It was a brilliant training session. Initially, setting our fears sounded like an odd concept to me, as while I’m used to setting goals, I’d never thought about it from the other perspective. It was eye-opening and reassuring to hear the senior team share their fears and see how simple the solutions could be. Doing this exercise showed trust and transparency and boosted team spirit as we continue to work from home. These things will become even more important as we enter this new phase of growth, and I’m excited to be a part of it!” – Georgie, Junior Account Executive

Fear setting vs goal setting: A technique for making good business decisions

While co-design and patient centricity are far from new to the industry, I thoroughly enjoyed learning about all the ways in which digital health innovators, from the high street to the global stage, are harnessing the power of co-design to further enhance healthcare solutions through digitalisation.

Many speakers emphasised that we will only get to a place where everyone can benefit from digital health if we can effectively address the challenge of digital inclusion. This can, and should, take many forms. Emma Stone, Director of Design, Research &amp; Communications at Good Things Foundation drew our attention to the value of community digital health hubs. These refer to physical premises, often temporary, which pop-up in different local areas to tackle the issue of building digital literacy and confidence. Members of the public can go to these welcoming spaces to seek advice on trusted online health services or be shown how to access health-related peer support online.
These facilities do not just provide access and support to the online world. They also improve connectedness within real, local communities to help build confidence and skills that are shareable. In my view, this seemed like a practical way to ‘design-out’ inequalities for those who may not have the access, skills and confidence to engage with digital health services.
The benefits of co-design also extend beyond just patients, though. Liz Ashall-Payne is the Founding CEO at ORCHA, the world’s leading, independent digital health evaluation and distribution organisation. Ashall-Payne is an expert in safe digital health adoption, and spoke about challenging the assumption that clinicians possess the level of digital literacy required to guide patients to trusted resources or recommend digital health solutions, such as apps.
According to ORCHA’s research, there are about 3,000 mental health apps currently in existence, and this number is growing at rapid-fire pace. So, if HCPs are not made aware of these services or do not have the digital literacy required to navigate them, how can they effectively leverage these solutions, both for them and their patients?
By involving HCPs in the design of these digital health solutions or indicating solutions that are NHS-approved, this will not only help upskill those being left behind, but also ensure the solutions can be recommended.
My takeaway learning from the congress was that we must avoid making assumptions when it comes to digital literacy. To be truly inclusive, digital health must allow all to voice their concerns and educational needs to ensure no one is left behind.

Bringing healthcare to life