CHC Work Experience: Helping create the next generation of healthcare communicators

We were lucky enough to have Rosie and Hatixhe join us for the week as part of their school’s dedicated work experience programme. They came to us bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, ready to find out what it’s like to:

1. Work in healthcare comms
2. Be part of a central London-based agency
3. Work a 9-5 day
4. Make the difficult decision of either Pret or Wasabi for lunch

The CHC team was keen to provide a well-rounded insight into the work we do and the difference we try to make with it. A chock-a-block calendar of activities that featured interactions with each of our team was put together, covering every aspect of our day-to-day responsibilities and an insight into what we’re currently working on and our client mix. The ladies were brought into the thick of it from day one, helping with research for some of our projects, including finding women’s health social media influencers, researching the population demographic mix in Liverpool to aid an upcoming stakeholder interviews project, and supporting our internal marketing projects. We also gave them the opportunity to live out their London office dreams – fancy lanyards ✅, Starbucks in hand ✅, and the opportunity to dip into the free biscuit stash whenever they liked ✅.

“Our favourite part of the week was learning how to carry out research tasks and reflecting on how much we learnt about different conditions such as heavy menstrual bleeding and routine adult vaccines. We really enjoyed finding out how we can use social media to help understand different conditions and what it’s really like to live with them.” - Hatixhe and Rosie.

If you’ve been around long enough and been to many a networking event in our industry, you will have heard people say, “I ended up in healthcare comms by accident”. This is a well-known trope, but at CHC, we’re trying to change this. We want to inspire the next generation of communicators and help them identify that this is the industry they want to be in and plot a path to it.

“During the week, we got to do both research and creative thinking. This enabled us to understand our personal strengths and start to understand the different types of jobs within healthcare communications and what we think we might want to do in the future. Being in the office was a really important part of the experience as it allowed us to understand all day-to-day things no one tells you about – how people at different levels interact, how the team speak to clients and suppliers and how many cups of coffee everyone drinks!” - Hatixhe and Rosie.

Both Rosie and Hatixhe were a great addition to the CHC team and provided great learnings for all of us. With their departure, we look forward to welcoming more budding young communicators to the CHC team in the future.

If you’re interested in doing work experience with us or an internship, please do reach out and contact us at [email protected]. We’d love to hear from you.