Resilience

Resilience – The UK Medicines Manufacturing Skills Centre of Excellence

In spring 2024, the government launched a project designed to help fill the skills gap in the UK’s advanced medicines manufacturing sector.  Resilience is a two-year, £4.3 million initiative that uses VR to help attract young people into the sector and train for vital laboratory and manufacturing skills.

Sway was tasked (in September last year) by the Resilience team to raise awareness of the project, nationally and in the regions where the major centres are located (Birmingham, London, Edinburgh and Teesside). The pharmaceutical, biotech and health sector were also key targets.

We started with a national release that attracted coverage in national business media, major pharmaceutical and biotech titles, and led to an interview with one of the co-directors, Professor Ivan Wall. Most importantly, the story was covered by Europe’s two biggest medicines manufacturing media outlets, as well as specialist manufacturing media.

There was also coverage in the health sector media.

The next phase was to regionalise the story, raising awareness of the key centres delivering the training and outreach programmes. This resulted in national and multiple regional/local coverage in Scotland, plus the country’s leading technology platform.

In addition, there was strong local/regional business media coverage around Birmingham – the University of Birmingham is the Resilience headquarters. The story was also picked up by MSN.

Following this phase we started focusing on key aspects of the project, and chose VR (and its role in helping the MHS reach net zero) as the hook for the next phase of activity, targeting health, technology, environmental, and business media.

The campaign to date has delivered coverage in all the key target media sectors, and we are currently rolling out the next phase, focusing on case studies of young people entering the industry after training as part of the Resilience programme.

“The Sway PR team are the best PR team I have worked with by far. Their level of professionalism, courtesy, and ability to pinpoint the challenges and opportunities for us are phenomenal. It has been a pleasure to work with Sway and we fully recommend them.”

Ivan Wall, RESILIENCE Co-Director