Jacqui Sanders leads the UK health and life sciences division at FleishmanHillard, excelling as a healthcare communications professional. Her success stems from a dedication to bringing innovative medicines to those in need, dramatically improving lives.
In an era marked by scientific breakthroughs and evolving patient requirements, healthcare communications serve as a crucial bridge between innovation and impact. Groundbreaking developments must extend beyond laboratories and clinical trials to transform real-world patient outcomes.
Today’s healthcare landscape is complex and ever-changing, driven by technological disruption, rising transparency expectations, and the imperative to build trust with diverse stakeholders, including patients, clinicians, regulators, and investors. Against this backdrop, the role of healthcare communicators has evolved from simple messengers to proactive collaborators in innovation and patient advocacy. They are tasked not merely with conveying information but with crafting narratives that foster collaboration, influence policy changes, and enhance health outcomes.
This transformation requires leadership that is responsive, compassionate, and deeply attuned to the patient experience. Jacqui Sanders exemplifies such leadership. She has carved out a remarkable career, demonstrating the vision and resilience needed to advance healthcare communications and set new industry standards.
Early Journey: Life Sciences to Healthcare Communications
Jacqui’s journey towards becoming an influencer in healthcare communications was anything but direct, but each turn was purpose-driven. Having had a strong life science background, Jacqui was first attracted to public affairs because she wanted to make a difference in healthcare. Her move into healthcare communications, however, was the turning point that enabled her to combine scientific knowledge and passion for effect. This action allowed her to champion access to new medicines developed by the pharmaceutical sector, bridging the distance between sophisticated scientific advancements and the actual needs of patients.
Early in her professional life, Jacqui was privileged to work with a team that believed in strategic thinking, something that has stayed at the core of her leadership philosophy. Her experiences extend beyond the professional realm; supporting her daughter’s professional tennis aspirations offered her unique insights into building high-performing teams, fostering resilience, and embracing agility. These lessons in leadership and performance under pressure have profoundly influenced her people-centred approach, which balances strategic excellence with a deep understanding of human dynamics.
People-Centred Leadership: The Heart of Jacqui’s Approach
Jacqui’s leadership style is fundamentally people-centred, a philosophy rooted in the belief that exceptional results are driven by people, not just processes. In today’s complex healthcare environment, this means creating conditions where individuals and teams can thrive, cultivating cultures of collaboration, trust, and accountability, while maintaining a sharp focus on outcomes. The pressures on businesses are immense, requiring resilience, speed, and impact. Jacqui has learned to adjust her leadership to these needs by incorporating technology and agility, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic, which was a critical turning point.
Empathy has now become a strategic tool instead of a soft skill in this new environment. Jacqui uses empathy to get to the depth of client requirements, create trust amongst teams, and develop more effective relationships. Her style combines science literacy with emotional intelligence so that clients are heard, teams are enabled, and communications connect at a human level where it counts most. This contemporary definition of people-first is not so much about being nice as it is about delivering tangible business outcomes and meaningful change in healthcare.
Changing Perspectives: From “What’s the Matter with You?” to “What Matters to You?”
One of Jacqui’s core beliefs is that healthcare communications must move beyond traditional paradigms that focus solely on disease or dysfunction. Instead, it should embrace a more holistic understanding of patients’ lives and priorities. This shift from asking “What’s the matter with you?” to “What matters to you?” is fundamental to driving meaningful innovation and patient-centred care.
Jacqui has been a pioneer in incorporating patient voices into each phase of healthcare development and communication. Her teams realized years ago the strength of co-creating solutions with patients and healthcare professionals directly. Since then, this practice has grown stronger, bolstered by strict research and analytics that yield profound understanding of the patient experience. These insights, fueled by data, guide client decision-making in research and development, driving innovation from the ground up and influencing communications planning from initial research to commercialization.
Through patient engagement and advocacy capabilities, Jacqui makes sure that the voice of the patient is not an add-on but a core anchor. Her teams use profound cultural insight and behavioural science to reach out to stakeholders in meaningful ways, from patients and healthcare providers to investors and staff. All messages are grounded in real experience, enabling clients to show how their innovations really connect and make practical impacts on individuals’ health journeys.
Lessons from Elite Sports: Leadership and Strategy in High Performance
Jacqui’s leadership philosophy is uniquely enriched by her experiences in elite sports management and education, which may seem distant from healthcare communications but share striking parallels. The principles of understanding individuals deeply, building the right development strategies, and fostering resilience and agility are universal. Whether guiding an athlete’s career or leading a healthcare communications team, the goal is to unlock full potential and drive impactful change.
Developing a game plan for an athlete’s success mirrors setting a clear vision and strategy for a team or business. Bold visions inspire, but they must be broken down into achievable milestones, with flexibility to adapt when necessary. Jacqui’s exposure to top sports psychologists and performance under pressure has sharpened her ability to support teams in demanding situations-staying calm, thinking decisively, and reducing unnecessary distractions.
This systematic, data-driven process of continuous improvement-learning from success and failure-is strictly followed in her leadership. The outcome is a unique style that inspires, encourages teamwork, and utilizes each person’s strengths to build high-performing teams that can achieve excellence in the challenging healthcare setting.
Building High-Performing Teams: Trust, Transparency, and Collaboration
Her success has its foundation in being able to build high-performing teams through fostering environments where individuals are trusted, heard, and feel a part of something greater. Her people-focused leadership of life sciences communications is built on transparency, a clear standard for impact, and promoting constructive challenge instead of just consensus.
Deliberate collaboration is the way forward. Jacqui assembles experts from a range of functions-scientific narrative, behavioural psychology, policy, patient involvement, culture, creative, media, and digital-to make sure that all sides are explored. It is not a hierarchical approach but about getting the best thinking quickly and efficiently. Respecting specialists and psychological safety allow team members to voice their opinions and contribute significantly.
Real-time feedback is central to this culture-supportive, actionable, and growth-oriented approach. The focus is on deploying individual strengths to achieve excellence. Clients seek Jacqui’s teams not only for problem-solving but also for resilience, speed, and results. These qualities are embedded in the team culture through shared purpose, mutual support, clarity, technology integration, and empowerment.
Balancing Leadership and Life: The Human Touch
Jacqui recognizes that balancing leadership at the highest level with personal responsibilities is a lifelong process. She insists on using perspective, understanding that even the most difficult circumstances can be managed through kindness and re-calibration. Spending time with family, friendships, and nature gives her energy and balance.
Her multiple interests-art, music, literature, and relating to people from all walks of life-give her work new eyes and a human element. Spreading joy and laughter in the workplace prevents burnout and creates a positive atmosphere. This integrated view of life and work makes her leadership richer and the multifaceted, high-pressure healthcare communications worlds she operates in more satisfying.
Grasping the Future: AI and the Future of Healthcare Communications
Looking to the future, Jacqui is optimistic about the change-making potential of artificial intelligence (AI) in healthcare communications. She encourages aspiring professionals to be motivated by a sincere desire to make a positive impact, coupling scientific interest with communication abilities and a sharp understanding of AI capabilities.
Critical thinking and strategic thinking are still essential, along with skills in AI tools for data analysis, content creation, and audience targeting. But Jacqui emphasizes that uniquely human capabilities-creativity, empathy, and critical thinking-will become increasingly important. The ability to work in teams where AI is a collaborator, not a substitute, is critical to achieving maximum impact.
Jacqui’s vision is to empower teams to deliver unparalleled impact by integrating AI into multifunctional, data-driven collaboration while preserving human insight and creativity. Strategy development will become hyper-targeted and audience-centric, cutting through content noise with authenticity and accuracy.
Communications will more and more link reputation management, R&D innovation, commercialization, corporate affairs, and government relations-maximizing ROI and extending impact. Jacqui is dedicated to furthering sector specialization to deliver clients with the advisory experience they require in this fast-changing environment.
Legacy and Vision: Advocating the Patient’s Voice
Jacqui’s legacy is deeply intertwined with the evolving role of the patient in healthcare. She aspires to be known for championing a future where patient voices are truly central to policy, regulation, R&D, and communications-powered by her distinctive people-centred leadership.
In a time plagued by disinformation, this kind of leadership is essential to establishing and sustaining trust in science, industry, and government through clear and effective communications. Wherever she goes, Jacqui is committed to showing how contemporary, human-focused methods are the strongest means to create meaningful and enduring positive effect in healthcare.
