A parent sat down beside her son for a routine blood test and asked Martyn Davey whether he recognized her. He didn’t. A year earlier, she said, he had taken her blood, asked how she was, and then asked a second time. That second question was the one she answered honestly, and she told him it was the reason she was still there to have that Christmas with her boy. Martyn tells the story on this episode, and then gives the rule he took from it: always ask twice.
Just a Sharp Scratch is his show. It is a UK podcast about nursing associates, a clinical role most of the public cannot define, and for this episode he handed over the reins for the first time. Peter Murphy Lewis, founder of Strategic Pete and host of the healthcare docuseries People Worth Caring About, took the host seat and put the microphone on him instead. Martyn calls the swap bizarre and admits he nearly talked himself out of it.
What comes out is a case study in building visibility for work nobody has a word for. A Facebook group started in 2017 with thirty-five members. A podcast made because the search for one returned nothing. A YouTube channel, documentaries, a limited company, and a leadership fellowship for a group that has no leadership program. Martyn measures none of it in downloads. He measures it by whether a stranger in the street could say what a nursing associate is. Our article on a healthcare marketing strategy picks up where this conversation leaves off.
Key Takeaways
1. The Podcast Exists Because the Search Result Was Empty
Martyn went looking for a podcast about nursing associates the way anyone looks for anything, and came back with nothing. “I found none, absolutely none,” he says. There was the occasional twenty-minute snippet from someone else’s show, nothing built for the role itself. He had already started a Facebook group for his own cohort in 2017; thirty-five people joined, and he says it now carries more than six and a half thousand nursing associates. The podcast came from the same instinct. He assumed it would be easy. “I was completely wrong.”
2. Ask Someone How They Are a Second Time
The practice Martyn keeps returning to costs nothing and takes about two minutes. Ask how somebody is, listen to the answer, then ask again. “It’s always the second time when you get the true answer of how they are truly feeling,” he says. He did not learn it in training. He learned it from a parent who came back a year later and told him what those extra minutes had meant. The first answer is a reflex, and the reflex is fine. The se