Campaign supporters have told us that Norfolk & Suffolk NHS Foundation Trust (NSFT) has appointed Tribe PR and Andrew Stronach Communications to help it with its PR at a cost of thousands of pounds even though NSFT has its own Communications Team.
The Tribe PR website outlines the company’s skills in ‘crisis management’ as part of its business of ‘managing reputations.’ We thought NSFT believes that there isn’t a crisis.
Tribe PR says:
We can’t make it go away, but we can help you plan for those bad days…
Here’s what Tribe PR says about its work for Bernard Matthews:
We were retained to protect the company’s reputation in the aftermath of the Jamie Oliver assault on Turkey Twizzlers. The day we started, bird flu hit the headlines and the UK’s media descended on the company looking for comment. Our job was to handle this and also to advise on a serious incident of bird cruelty. The company was congratulated for its handling of these issues.
Our questions for Tribe PR:
- Is NSFT the Bernard Matthews of the NHS?
- Is the radical redesign the Turkey Twizzler of mental healthcare innovation?
- Is the Campaign to Save Mental Health Services in Norfolk & Suffolk Jamie Oliver? Pukka!
- In Tribe PR-speak, has the meaning of ‘assault’ changed from ‘make a physical attack on’ to ‘tell the truth about a product or service in the public interest’?
- Is the disastrous redundancy programme the bird flu epidemic?
- What’s the animal cruelty? Is it the loss of the Section 75 agreement, the dire NHS staff survey, the crisis team crisis, the bed crisis, the community team crisis, the impending financial deficit, the CQC failure or something else? There are so many candidates to choose from. None seems a perfect fit for playing baseball with poultry.
- Wasn’t the outcome that consumers abandoned Bernard Matthews products and that Bernard Matthews abandoned manufacture of Turkey Twizzlers, moved its production back to the UK at huge cost, made years of losses and sacked it CEO?
- Wouldn’t public money be better spent as intended on providing decent community services and local beds for the needy and vulnerable rather than on expensive spin from external consultants?