You’re 432 rows deep in an NHS spreadsheet, questioning your life choices, when something unexpected pops up: a man aged 102, prescribed Viagra on the NHS.
It turned out to be the oldest patient in the country recorded as receiving erectile dysfunction treatment — and the basis for an exclusive that ran in the Sunday Mirror on the 6th July under the headline: “Man Aged 102 Taking Viagra.”
But that wasn’t the first time this dataset delivered. Two weeks earlier, we’d sorted the same figures by region and spotted something else: East Riding of Yorkshire had the highest Viagra prescribing rate in England. Northumberland, Dorset and Fylde & Wyre weren’t far behind. Meanwhile, Leicester came in flaccid at just 1.5%.
That story got in The Sun on Sunday as “North Gets Pill Help” on the 22nd of June.
Same dataset. Different column. Two national stories.
One focused on age, and the unlikely endurance of Britain’s centenarian Casanovas. The other mapped a regional pattern of NHS prescribing, with the North clearly rising to the occasion.
It didn’t require fancy modelling. Just clean public data, sorted with the right filter and a bit of journalistic instinct.
Whether you’re interested in peaks in performance, digging into hard data, or simply looking to stand up and be counted, this is what we do.
If you’re working on a campaign and you need it to perform, drop us a line today.
