When you work in the health and social care sector, this often means balancing many priorities. One day you’re ensuring quality care, managing regulatory requirements and the next you’re supporting your staff and serving your communities – often while navigating funding pressures and workforce challenges. So it’s no wonder that communication falls to the bottom of your list while everything else demands your attention. 

But here’s the hard truth. In health and social care, how you communicate can be – and more often than not – as critical as the care you provide.

When your messaging is unclear, your target audience can’t understand your services, when staff feel overwhelmed or disconnected or even when your community doesn’t know the vital work you do – these are no longer just communication problems. They directly impact your occupancy or enquiry rates, recruitment efforts, regulatory outcomes and ultimately your ability to deliver excellent care.

If you’ve been wondering whether it’s time to bring in external communication support, you’re not alone. In this blog, we highlight the main signs that indicate external communication may be needed.

Signs it might be time to bring in specialist help:

1. Occupancy rates or referrals have plateaued or declined 

Your beds aren’t filling as quickly as they should, or enquiries for your services have stagnated. For care homes, current data shows the average occupancy in England sits at 86% – meaning 14% of beds remain vacant. For home care providers, self-funding enquiries may have dried up. For specialist services, referrals from GPs and hospitals aren’t coming through as consistently as they once did.

Empty beds and missed referrals aren’t always about the quality of your care. Often, they’re about visibility and reputation. If people can’t find you, understand what you offer, or see what makes you different, your excellent care remains a well-kept secret.

This is when external support helps!

Building occupancy requires consistent, strategic visibility – local PR that keeps you in the community conversation, digital marketing that puts you in front of families searching for care, relationship-building with referral sources and compelling content that gives people reasons to choose you.

These activities require dedicated time and specialist skills. When you’re already stretched thin delivering care, bringing in external support means these critical activities actually happen, consistently with measurable results.

2. No one has time for communications (So nothing happens consistently) 

Your administrator handles social media when she has a spare moment. Your manager writes the occasional press release. Your website was last updated months ago. Team members post sporadically on your Facebook and LinkedIn pages with no clear strategy. Important stories about residents, staff achievements or the difference you make go undocumented because nobody has time to capture them.

This isn’t a failing of your team. It’s the tough reality of limited resources. But the result is the same: sporadic, ineffective communications that fail to build the consistent presence your organisation needs.

This is when external support helps!

Time is your most expensive resource. When communication falls to people who are already doing three other jobs, it never gets the attention it fully needs.

External support means communication becomes someone’s dedicated responsibility – not an afterthought squeezed into spare moments. You get consistent execution, strategic planning and professional quality without adding to your team’s workload. More importantly, your internal team’s time returns to what they do best: delivering care.

The return on investment isn’t just better communications – it’s reclaiming hours your managers and staff were spending on tasks they weren’t trained for and didn’t have time to do well.

3. Your community don’t understand what makes you different 

When prospective residents, clients or their families ask what makes your service special, you or your team struggle to articulate it clearly. Your website and marketing materials look similar to every other provider in your area. You know you deliver outstanding care with a distinctive approach, but you can’t seem to convey that unique value in a way that resonates with the people who need to hear it.

You’re so immersed in delivering care that you can’t see what makes you special from the outside. Or perhaps you’re uncomfortable with “selling” yourself – many care professionals feel this way. But without clear differentiation, families see you as interchangeable with other providers.

This is when external support helps!

An outside perspective can help identify what makes you distinctive and it’s often things you take for granted or don’t realise are unique. Communication specialists can help you articulate your values, develop clear messaging and create marketing materials that differentiate you from competitors. 

When audiences can clearly understand why you’re different and why that matters to them, they choose you for the right reasons rather than defaulting to price or location. In markets where care homes are consolidating, and home care is growing 5% annually, clear differentiation isn’t optional – it’s essential for survival.

4. Staff recruitment and retention are costing you

You’re advertising the same roles repeatedly. Recruitment is taking longer. The quality of candidates has declined. Staff turnover feels relentless. The numbers tell a stark story: care home staff turnover currently stands at 25%, while turnover for UK domestic care workers reaches 38.9%. 

Without strong employer branding and internal communications, you’re competing on pay alone in a sector where care workers can now earn similar wages in retail. Potential employees can’t see your culture, don’t understand your values and have no sense of what makes your organisation a great place to work.

This is when external support helps!

Attracting and retaining great staff requires two things a lot of health and social care organisations don’t have time for: employer branding that showcases your culture (through staff testimonials, behind-the-scenes content and photography that captures your environment), and internal communications that make existing staff feel valued and connected.

External support can develop recruitment marketing that actually sells your workplace, create content that potential employees respond to and establish internal communications that reduce turnover. More importantly, lower turnover means better continuity of care and stronger team morale.

5. You’re managing a crisis or reputation issue 

Something has happened – an incident, negative feedback, concerns raised by families or commissioners, complaints on social media or unexpected media attention. You’re not sure how to respond, what to say to different audiences or how to protect your reputation while being respectful and transparent. Alternatively, you’ve had near-misses and realise you have no plan for managing communications if something serious occurs.

In health and social care, crises can escalate quickly. In a world with social media at our fingertips, this means concerns can spread fast. Families, staff, regulators and the media all require different information and levels of detail. Without crisis communications expertise, well-meaning responses can inadvertently make situations worse, breach confidentiality or create long-term reputation problems.

This is when external support helps!

Crisis communications requires specific expertise that most providers don’t always have the luxury of having in-house. From knowing how to respond quickly but carefully, what to say and when to different stakeholders, how to be transparent while respecting confidentiality and how to manage the situation without making it worse.

External specialists can develop crisis communications plans before incidents occur, providing immediate support when something happens, coordinating responses across multiple stakeholders, managing media enquiries, monitoring social media and developing reputation recovery strategies. The impact of poorly managed crisis communications can come at a steep cost, and even more in lost occupancy and damaged relationships. Having expert support – either proactively or when a crisis hits – helps protect your reputation and minimises commercial and operational impact.

Interested in finding out more about Conteur’s crisis communications services? Head over to our YouTube channel to hear from Conteur Director and experienced ITV Journalist Gillian Davies, who walks you through handling a possible business crisis with ease, from the first second to long-lasting crisis management.

You’re Not Alone

Thousands of health and social care providers face these same communications challenges every single day. As the sector operates with limited resources, complex regulations, intense competition and the fundamental reality that care delivery always comes first.

The good news is that you don’t have to figure it out alone. External communications support exists precisely because organisations need specialist expertise, capacity and strategic guidance to complement the incredible care teams deliver every single day.

Whether you’re a care home struggling with occupancy, a home care provider competing in a growing market, an NHS trust managing complex change, or a healthcare charity trying to demonstrate impact, the signs above indicate when external support could make a difference.

If you’ve recognised your organisation in this blog, perhaps it’s time for a conversation about what communication support could look like for you.

To get started, why not get in touch with our award-winning creative communications team today!