Engaging People: The Fundamentals of Effective Workforce Communication

What would the NHS do with an extra £2 to 3 billion every year? Rachel Royall presents this as an estimate of the potential cost of poor communication, once you add up avoidable harm, legal payouts and lost productivity. In this interactive session from the Connected Health & Care Summit 2026, Rachel Royall, founder of Blue Lozenge and former Director of Communications at NHS Digital, uses real clinical scenarios to expose where communication fails, reveals a scenario in her own cancer diagnosis experience, and introduces the HEART model for rethinking communication in healthcare. 

Watch Rachel Royall use her own cancer diagnosis to show how poor communication costs lives and billions, then lead an interactive workshop on three real clinical scenarios and introduce the HEART model for healthcare communication. 

What the session covers and the scale of the problem

This session combines hard data, interactive scenario exercises and a deeply personal story. Figures discussed during the session include: 

• Poor communication is the sole cause of approximately one in 10 patient safety incidents and a contributing factor in roughly a quarter 

• 55% of people report experiencing poor communication from the NHS 

• Communication problems are the single biggest category of patient concerns about hospital care 

• Litigation costs in the NHS have reached approximately £3.6 billion, with a large proportion attributable to communication failures 

• Better goals-of-life conversations alone could save an estimated £3 million per trust per year 

• Everyday friction in information flow costs over £1 billion a year in lost productivity, equivalent to 20,000 full-time staff or 40 million patient appointments 

• All three workshop scenarios are real. Scenario one is based on Rachel Royall’s own delayed breast cancer diagnosis