Persuading doctors to take pain seriously

Our client, Mundipharma, gave us some astonishing statistics. Some 487,000 people in Ireland suffer from moderate to severe pain on a daily basis. Pain can be treated, but only 13,000 people were receiving pain control treatment.

The main problem was that people were just not telling their doctors about their pain, so our brief was to encourage GPs to take two minutes out of the consultation to ask about pain in order to be able to treat it.

Our insight was that the vast majority of people suffering pain take absolutely nothing to help manage it.

We decided to treat 'nothing' as if it were a pharmaceutical product, and created a direct mail piece based on the idea of being subscribed 'Nothing' for pain relief.

The Nothing product was designed to be eye catching and engaging for GPs who are often recipients of freebies from sales people.

We also created a press ad for the medical journals.

And finally, we developed an online tool that would allow GPs and patients to confidentially monitor, measure and ultimately manage pain. This was the website paintracker.ie, where GPs and patients are able to keep a journal of their pain using standard measurment charts.

The Nothing campaign was nominated for an ICAD award.