The penultimate year in Comms at LYPFT 

Oliver Tipper, Head of Communications at the Trust, shares his team’s annual report for the year 2025/6 in this blog post.

An image that says "Communications at LYPFT Our Year 2025/6" with a montage of images taken throughout the year. Comms teams are often criticised for not doing their own PR – shining a light on themselves for a change rather than the people they serve or represent. So, we’ve written our own annual report for 2025/6.

It’s the penultimate one we’ll ever do for Leeds and York Partnership NHS Foundation Trust, as we’re merging with Leeds Community Healthcare NHS Trust (LCH) as of 1 April 2027 (no, this is not some elaborate April fool).

Some might say writing your own annual report sounds a dull and dry way of doing your own PR. Whilst that depends on how you write it, I would also say the journey is as important as the destination!

In other words, the process to get the end product is a great exercise for the whole team to contribute to. Because let’s face it, we’ve all slept a few times during and since 2025/6, so its brilliant to revisit all the hard work and success stories of the year. It’s shocking how much of my own work I’d forgotten about.

One very pleasing phrase I hear from colleagues, especially from the longer serving veterans within the team, is that “things are so much better now because . . .” followed by an example of how we’ve made improvements to the way the team works, the quality of the work we do, and the impact we have supporting the Trust.

I like to think one of the reasons for this is that we have a strategy in place. Whilst they can be cumbersome documents, strategies give you clarity on what’s important and where to put your time and energy. They also give you permission to say things like “sorry that’s not one of our strategic priorities”, or “here’s the guide on how you can do this yourself”.

Our strategy has five aims. They are:

  1. We provide an outstanding communications service to the Trust that improves the health and lives of the communities we serve.
  2. We tell great stories.
  3. We promote and protect our brand in line with our values of integrity, caring and keeping it simple.
  4. We support and enable all our people to be great communicators through advice, guidance, consultancy and training (communications is, after all, in everybody’s job description!).
  5. We warn and inform – leading on communications that saves lives and prevents harm before, during and after serious incidents.

How we operationally deliver on those aims is set out in our 10 strategic objectives – and you can read more on how we did on them during 2025/6 in Section 3 of the report.

I remember once hearing (from a wiser comms pro than I) that the purpose of strategy is to be “intentional”, rather than being constantly reactive to other people’s demands or just responding chaotically to stuff that happens around you. We’ve probably all worked in teams like that at some point.

I would go on to say that any comms strategy can only be as good as the organisation’s strategy. In other words, you’ve got to know what’s important to your top team, figure out how your team can apply themselves to best support them, and then create the conditions for success.

In our team, we’ve done a lot of work behind the scenes to create those conditions – whether it be developing procedures, improving workflow and project allocation, running comms planning sessions, creating training guides etc etc.

But we did it. And by doing it, we’ve made space and time to do some great stuff – the evidence you’ll hopefully see for yourselves.

The future ain’t what it used to be

As I said earlier, our Trust is set to merge with LCH by 1 April 2027. So, our team focus is very much on developing and launching a new organisation, as well as merging two comms teams who’ve only just started to work closely together.

As campaign projects go, this is a biggie! Here’s a flavour of what we’ll be focusing on this year:

  • Run a huge team development programme to bring our two communications team together and be working in harmonious tandem by 1 April 2027.
  • Create a new brand for the new organisation – including running a consultation on deciding what our new name should be (no it won’t be Trusty McTrustface!).
  • Ensure the new organisation has a website, intranet and range of comms channels including social media.

The strapline for the merger process is “best of both” – meaning we are learning from each other and taking the best of what each Trust does into the new organisation – whatever we decide to call it.

That is going to require us to be open minded and ready to compromise. It might be that we need to let go of that particular channel or product we’ve spent years honing into the well-oiled machine that it is today. But that’s okay, because everything has a natural lifecycle.

The important thing is to share knowledge, learning and expertise willingly and without prejudice for the benefit of the new bigger team.

Because, if the team wins, we all win.

 

A picture of Oliver Tipper in a suit and tie

Oliver Tipper is Head of Communications at Leeds and York Partnership NHS Foundation Trust.

Download a PDF version of the report here.

 

You can also download an accessible Word document version of the annual report here.