The deeper the NHS funding crisis bites, the harder it is to justify pie-in-the-sky projects like Genomics England (GE) that divert resources and time from simply keeping the health service functioning. That’s presumably why the emphasis at this massively expensive outfit has been switching to image management over the past months.
After I disclosed in the spring that GE was seeking a communications director, it now wants to install, too, a head of internal communications to “create an engaging drumbeat for communications across the business”.
Thirteen years and £2bn of public money on from its launch while David Cameron was prime minister, GE has undoubtedly made a few quid for Cameron’s paymasters at the American gene sequencing giant Illumina, but the promised health breakthroughs have proved elusive.
It’s open to question why a serious effort to improve public health should be fretting so much about public relations, but the whispers in the City are that it’s about to be sold off before too long to a private company that would be interested only in monetising its data. Tellingly, GE is looking for comms professionals with “strong experience in both public and private sector communications, in complex and politically nuanced environments”.
