Poacher turned gamekeeper: How to get your message onto the BBC

By Laurence Lee, director of media

Hats off to Antony Sumara, chief executive of the previously-unglamorous Mid-Staffordshire NHS Foundation Trust.

Mr Sumara used a column on the BBC’s blog (can you imagine a NHS manager blogging?) to express his views on BBC programme Holby City. His argument on the blog was that hospital dramas often paint a misleading picture of doctors and nurses as being philandering gossips who don’t wash their hands enough.

It was a good story, good enough to get Mr Sumara onto the Today Programme up against the BBC’s head of drama. In the process he got his real, somewhat unrelated point across – that doctors and nurses in the NHS are entitled to a contract with the public in which they each show each other some respect. Not only did he make his real point, he made it in front of large, influential audience.

The reason why this was brilliant? For a start, there’s no way in the world that Mr Sumara would have got any coverage by going to the BBC with the real message he wanted to sell. It’s just not very interesting, or newsworthy. But he had the courage to do something just a bit different, and got himself a bag load of positive coverage.

There’s obviously the other residual interest that hearing an NHS manager say something even mildly provocative comes around as often as a solar eclipse, so he was always going to be on to a winner. But to all those risk-averse brand managers who would run a mile if it was suggested to them: why be so afraid of the media?