Health & Wellbeing Marketplace at Lancashire Teaching Hospitals

We know that working in the NHS is becoming more and more challenging for everyone so the library wanted to host an event which showcased the Health & Wellbeing (H&W) offer the Trust has for all staff and students. We didn’t just want a library event, we wanted to involve other teams in the Trust.

The library has good relationships with many teams that support the H&W of staff so we were able to approach the following people/teams to see if they wanted to come along and showcase their wares at our event:

· H&W Team
· Tobacco and Alcohol Support
· Chaplaincy
· Equality, Diversity & Inclusivity (EDI) team
· Learner Support
· Psychology for Staff
· Mindfulness practitioner

Psychology for Staff and the Mindfulness Practitioner were unable to attend but the others all confirmed. Once we had started to advertise the event we had the following people asking if they could also come along to support.

· Macmillan Cancer Support
· Freedom to Speak Up champion
· Dr Das, Consultant Neurologist, and trained hypnotherapist who wanted to demo self-hypnosis techniques to help with stress.

On the day Learner Support could not attend due to some meeting clashes (they did leave some leaflets on a table) and also the EDI team due to sickness. The event ran on 14th April 2026 from 10am-2pm in one of our Education Centres at Preston and after a very slow start people started to come into the room from around 10.45.

We provided cake, tea and coffee and had advertised the event heavily for about 4 weeks prior. We put up a lot of posters around the hospital, had included it in the Trust internal comms, our own newsletters and emails. We also added a footer to our emails, put up posters in the staff accommodation blocks and put it on social media.

The email footer was a resized image of the poster we had created. The free books were all withdrawn wellbeing books that we wrapped up and people could take. We had around 40 books and they all went.
We had feedback sheets out (next to the cake) but only 2 people completed them. We tried to keep a tally of how many people we spoke to and about what but that was difficult at times as we had a few busy periods. However, we estimate we spoke with over 50 people, got a few new members and we had some really good conversations with people who came along and also those who were manning the stalls.

After the event I received some very nice feedback from those people who manned the stalls and they were all very pleased at how well the event went. So much so that we have arranged another one for the end of November. Hopefully this can become a twice yearly event and if the November one is also a success we will look at holding an event at Chorley.

For next time we need to make sure we make people fill out the feedback sheets so we can gather more impact. Maybe have a sign in sheet so we know who is coming and it would also be useful to ask how they heard about the event to see which of our marketing channels worked.

Sarah Woodhall

Operational Library Manager
Lancashire teaching Hospitals NHS FT