Recommendation 11

HM Government Acknowledged

At early stages in the crisis the situation in many countries was confused and uncertain. It therefore took longer than we would have liked to be able to provide specific guidance on when and how to return to the UK, and on the availability of local services. advice, including individually tailored support. On the contrary, social media has been used as an additional tool that has increased our capacity to provide such support. We have shared general messages about travel safety on social media since 2009. We share all significant changes to travel advice and proactively push messages on specific issues relevant to our audience (e.g. snow sport safety, festival safety), as well as using social media for campaign activity. British nationals overseas and in the UK can now contact us on social media, either in a comment or through direct/private messaging. All enquiries are replied to individually and escalated to Consular officers in London and across our global network where appropriate. This does not replace any other option available to British people, which includes phone calls (usually at local rates wherever the individual is located) and a dedicated webform on gov.uk. Our aim is to enable British nationals to contact us easily and quickly wherever they are. The contact options we have reflect this. that organic search and direct emails far outstripped click through to Travel Advice via social media channels. Analysis also showed that family and friends in the UK were often a particularly effective way to reach British nationals in certain countries. In some countries, certain social media platforms had more reach than others (for example Twitter in Colombia). This in-depth analysis meant that communication plans for each country were bespoke to each country. We are examining how we can increase the relevance and uptake of Travel Advice alerts in the future. We agree that all consular customers should be treated with empathy and respect. This is why front line consular officers undertake extensive training to ensure they respond to customers in an empathetic and compassionate manner. The core consular training course has a strong focus on engaging customers, with opportunities to practice the handling of complex and often challenging cases with actors. This is followed by niche training on specific case areas. We are proud that frontline consular staff receive a significant amount of positive feedback from their customers, praising the care, kindness and comprehensive support they receive. But we also strive to improve: our dedicated Customer Insight responding to need and feedback; and our complaints team seeks to respond thoroughly and compassionately to any customers who are dissatisfied. Many British nationals were worried about underlying medical conditions and access to medicines. In the majority of instances local assistance and equivalent medication was available from local doctors and pharmacies. All our travel advice pages contain advice on how to access local medical services. In many places our consular staff provided tailored support to help BNs receive the medication they needed, for example by contacting local police, arranging for local authorities to deliver medicines or by visiting pharmacies and medical centres themselves to identify where the required medications could be found and how they could be delivered. For example, in Goa, at the height of lockdown, movement outside of homes was very restricted and our staff organised for the local police to check on a medically vulnerable individual and identify a local neighbour who they could go to for future support. In Punjab, our staff recorded details for all British nationals who were running out of medication and forwarded their details, with their consent, to the Government appointed Health Officer, and as a result they were able to get medicines delivered to them.