Doctors accused of being “horrible” over government’s cancer awareness campaign

Doctors’ negativity threatened to derail plans for a government anticancer campaign that is now achieving positive results, a health official has said.

James Brandon, head of marketing for Public Health England, said that many GPs and other health professionals were “horrible” towards the Be Clear on Cancer campaign when it was conceived in 2011 by the Department of Health.

It was designed to raise awareness of the signs and symptoms of cancer and prompt people with concerns to visit their doctor.

But Brandon said that there were fears it might not “get off the ground” because health professionals argued that it would send many people to clinics who did not need to be there.

He explained how the campaign had been constructed and piloted at an Inside Government conference in London on 12 June on improving social marketing and communications in public health.

He said that attitudes had changed after doctors working in primary and secondary care were “properly engaged.” “It’s gone from shock and awe at first to acceptance,” he said.

Brandon said that the campaign, now overseen by Public Health England, had raised public awareness of cancer, leading to more patients—especially men—going to see their GPs with possible symptoms and more onward referrals to hospitals for diagnostic tests.

Brandon said that further evaluations would take place. “We haven’t got to the stage yet where we can say we’ve saved ‘x’ number of lives but we’ll be getting there shortly,” he said.

Campaigns to raise awareness of the signs and symptoms of bowel and lung cancer in England were rolled out nationally in 2012.

Brandon said that the use of “real GPs” in television adverts and other communications had made a “real difference.”

The conference heard how social marketing is being used in health to promote changes in citizens’ behaviours—such as drug use, smoking, alcohol consumption, and take up of physical activity—applying concepts and “insights” from the commercial sector.

It heard how people using social media channels, including Facebook and Twitter, are reacting to public health campaigns and actively helping to shape them.

Jon Latham, assistant director of marketing and donor contact with NHS Blood and Transplant, said that social media, backed by the “power of celebrities,” was effective in a campaign last year to register 100 000 blood donors within 100 days in time for the London 2012 Olympic Games.

“Social media must be part of an overall strategy, [and] not [be] used in isolation,” he said.

Andy Lloyd, media, communications, and social marketing manager for the Fresh Smoke Free North East campaign, said that this campaign had helped to cut smoking levels in the region, which had been among the “worst” in England.

Local ex-smokers who had featured in media adverts had become “stars” in their communities and were well motivated to remain quitters, he said. “If your face is on a 40ft billboard, you don’t want to be seen smoking outside a pub,” he said.

Lloyd said “fear based marketing” would work for some audiences, but for others messages needed to be more subtle.

Patrick Ladbury, director of the National Social Marketing Centre, put the case for publicising campaigns that hadn’t worked so that others could learn lessons from them.

He said that many people confused social marketing with social media. While it could involve different social media channels, social marketing was a planning process to develop programmes that would ensure behaviour change, he said.