A parent sat down beside her son for a routine blood test and asked Martyn Davey whether he recognised 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 programme. 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 second one is a person.
3. In Mental Health You Watch People Rebuild Rather Than Rescue Them
Martyn moved from physical care, where a break has an x-ray, a cast and a six-week plan, into a mental health service for teenagers. The adjustment was in him, not the patients. “There’s a point where you have to step back and allow them their journey,” he says, even when the instinct is to jump in and save them. His analogy is a house everybody starts building at birth on a foundation nobody chooses, damaged by what life does to it, and sometimes taken back to that foundation before it can be rebuilt stronger.
4. Changing the Public Narrative Is an Education Job Before a Marketing One
Asked what would actually make an unnoticed role noticeable, Martyn does not reach for a campaign. “I think education, that’s the biggest part,” he says, together with clear guidelines so that everyone sings from the same hymn sheet. The scope of practice was written before the pandemic and, in his view, needs looking at with fresh eyes. Without that clarity some employers stretch the role past what is safe, while others leave it unused entirely. He is firm about what it is not: “we are not cheap nurses.”
5. The Imposter Syndrome Never Left, and the Guests Are What Beat It
Hundreds of recorded hours in, Martyn still gets nervous before every episode, including this one. He says there were at least two he came close to cancelling, and stretches where he thought about stopping altogether. What turns it around is the conversation itself. He finishes a recording, goes straight to his wife and tells her it was brilliant. Without guests who believed they had a story worth telling, he says, the whole thing “would have crumbled years ago.” The cure for the doubt was doing the next one.
6. The Legacy Test Is Whether a Stranger Can Define the Role
Martyn has set himself a retirement condition. He will stop when he can ask somebody in the street what a nursing associate is and get an instant answer, the way people already answer for a nurse or a healthcare assistant. Everything he is building points at that. Just a Sharp Scratch Media Limited now sits over the shows and the YouTube channel, there are plans for a documentary shadowing the role abroad, and the Crown Fellowship is intended to give nursing associates the leadership route they currently do not have.
Rapid Fire Q&A
Q: What is your proudest professional moment?
A: Qualifying as a nursing associate. Martyn describes the graduation ceremony as breaking a curse, the first in his family to get there, with his eldest son in the room to watch it. He has to stop himself welling up telling it.
Q: And the proudest personal one?
A: Being invited to 10 Downing Street. He says there were five places and around two and a half thousand nursing associates who might have had one, and he assumed the email was spam. It fell on his wedding anniversary, so he sent his wife flowers with an apologetic card.
Q: How can a listener actually support the show?
A: Share it, talk about it, leave a comment, even just say hello. Martyn says those small signals are what tell him a real person is listening rather than a bot, and they are what keep him recording. He replies wherever he can.
Q: What is the one routine you could not lose?
A: The Harry Potter audiobooks read by Stephen Fry. They have got him to sleep through bad nights for years, to the point where he can no longer hear that voice on television without going under. Take them away, he says, and things would go terribly wrong.
Q: What line do you still repeat to yourself?
A: Two of them. Never give up, never surrender, which his son now says back to him. And a line from Mary Poppins he once quoted in a job interview, about there being an element of fun in every job that has to be done if you look for it.
What This Means for Healthcare Associations and Workforce Leaders
The gap Martyn is closing is not a reputation gap. It is a definition gap. People do not hold a low opinion of nursing associates, they hold no opinion, because they have never been given the word. That is the position a lot of healthcare employers are in with the roles they most need to fill. Recruitment campaigns assume the category already exists in the reader’s head. Run his test first: ask somebody outside the sector to say what the job is, and see what comes back.
The second lesson is what he did when the search came back empty. He did not read it as proof that nobody cared. He read it as an open lane and made the thing himself, then kept making it until the Facebook group, the podcast, the YouTube channel and the documentaries all pointed at the same role. An association or provider sitting on an empty search result is holding the same opportunity, and it is the reason Strategic Pete’s healthcare video production work starts with the question nobody in the market is answering.
Notice what the material actually is. Not a mission statement or a set of values, but a cup of tea offered to a family who have been waiting for hours, and a second question at a blood test. Ordinary shift moments are what make an unfamiliar job legible to somebody outside it, and they are already happening in every building you run. The same principle runs through the People Worth Caring About docuseries that Peter makes, where the people on camera are the ones doing the work.
Finally, the timescale and the metric. Martyn started in 2017 and is only now moving the platforms under one company, and he says the fellowship will take time to get off the ground because everything in the health service does. He still gets nervous before every recording. What keeps it honest is that his measure of success is recognition, not reach: a stranger who can name the role without hesitating. Pick a metric like that and the content programme has somewhere to go for the next five years.
Listen to the Full Episode
This episode of Just a Sharp Scratch went out on 10 December 2025 and reverses the usual arrangement. Martyn Davey, the show’s host and a long-running advocate for nursing associates in the UK, sat in the guest chair, while Peter Murphy Lewis, founder of Strategic Pete and host of People Worth Caring About, asked the questions. Credit to Martyn for handing over the reins for the first time in the show’s run. Watch the full takeover episode on the Just a Sharp Scratch channel.
