£8m campaign to recruit the next generation of nurses

On 5th July 2018, the NHS and advertising agency MullenLowe launched a long-term campaign funded by NHS England and the Department of Health and Social Care called We are the NHS. The aim of the £8m campaign is to inspire 22,000 applications into the NHS, to increase the number of nurses returning to the profession, and to improve retention at a time when there are more than 34,000 unfilled positions.
The advert is filmed in a few short weeks inside real hospitals in Kent with real patients and staff, including a woman giving birth to Maisie, born at 3.49am, weighing 7lbs 2. It captured surreal moments of reality for example a scene where nurses are dancing with a cancer patient in a paediatric ward. Toby Dye, director of the ad, said: “That just happened. There were moments that even the best writer or director wouldn’t have thought of.” He continued: “It was a terrifying pace, but it turned out to be one of the greatest strengths of the film. Everything is normally so planned that it can drain all of the life out of a film. Because we couldn’t do that for this, everything was real and captured ad hoc, and it gave the film vitality. Everyone was super proud for us to be filming because they wanted the world to see the great work that the NHS is doing.”
Hugh Todd, a creative director at MullenLowe, said: “We want people to look at this work, sort of thump their chests and say ‘Bloody hell, I love this country and I love the NHS. It has been part of the fabric of our society, but it must be going forward.” Shorter films were also made for Snapchat and Instagram to advertise the different nursing careers available in the NHS.