Addenbrooke’s first piloted past patient mailings in 2011 - long before the introduction of GDPR. So many NHS charities now ask me how on earth we did it when they themselves have such a battle with hospital colleagues who say “no” to past patient mailings on the basis of GDPR.

However, the hoops we had to jump through in 2011 were as challenging then as they are now in a GDPR era! This is because health data has always been considered sensitive data and subject to particularly strict guardianship - patient data can only be processed by hospital staff who are bound by the obligations of medical secrecy. This is made increasingly challenging due to Addenbrooke’s charity being independent of the Foundation Trust - a completely separate organisation with its own governance.

To make the mailings work in the early days, we entered a contract with the hospital to agree Terms of Reference for the patient mailings. These Terms of Reference stipulated we could run 4 mailings per year, what the criteria of the mailings would include and exclude (eg specific date parameters because recency was key, broad patient definitions vs department specific, exclusions of inpatients etc), roles and responsibilities of both parties, the golden 24 hour window when data would be pulled, honorary contracts, the hire-purchase of a special in-house mailing fulfilment printer.

It took months (and I mean over 6 months) to sign off the copy for the first patient letter and to agree who would be the signatory. Any Individual Giving expert will tell you that the way a letter is written, and who signs it is a combination of art and tried-and-tested science. There is a formula and charities deviate from the formula at your peril! However, to make the patient mailings a reality, we had to flex our expectations to get the letter through the approval process.

The hospital team’s golden rule was that there must not be an ask included. This letter was information-sharing and an invitation to find out more. It was to be made explicit in the letter that the charity did not (and would never) have access to patient data. There was a lot of explanation in the letter as there were so many concerns about complaints. In the early years there was no emotion. And the signatory was the then-Director of Patient Experience and not a nurse or a doctor as we had so eagerly hoped for.

We prepared and planned for complaints. We briefed the PALS team, reception teams, the charity team, our Trustees etc and braced ourselves. There was not a single complaint from the first mailing.

Here are some of the results we achieved from our first ever mailing:

·      The first mailing had a response rate of 3.8%. Industry standard for cold DM response rate is <0.5%!

·      We recruited 420 new people to our database.

·      It received no complaints

·      With no ask included, the mailing raised £21,229

·      The average gift was £84.

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It was an incredibly complex project. And it still is. But I would argue that it is absolutely worth it! Read my other post about lessons learned from a patient mailing programme to see what else I learned in 13 years of doing this.

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