Tips for Healthcare PR

By Thomas Mustac, Publicist — OtterPR

Medical professionals battle each and every day to help save lives. Given this mission, it's understandable that they tend to overlook the value of public relations (PR), but the truth is that having a robust PR strategy offers many benefits for medical providers.

Below, I explain how doing PR helps organizations and professionals in the healthcare industry, as well as provide tips for effective PR in this field.

Why should medical practitioners do PR?

A strong PR strategy enables doctors and other medical providers to educate and inform people, guiding them toward the care they need and might not have known about. It also helps patients get the care they need as quickly as possible. In this way, PR directly supports medical providers’ core mission.

Doing PR also boosts the credibility of particular doctors and medical facilities. By acting as thought leaders, doctors and other spokespeople position themselves at the forefront of their specialty. As a result, clients tend to value them more, and prospective patients are more likely to seek them out when they need care.

In my experience, many medical professionals are natural fits for PR because they are always learning and pushing their fields forward. In PR, we love anything new and cutting-edge, since we can capitalize on these opportunities. Just by being themselves, healthcare providers are often newsworthy, which gives us PR professionals tons of great angles that can interest both the media and readers.

Understand the goal of doing PR

The first step to conducting healthcare PR is to articulate what your goals are as clearly as possible, as this is one industry in which myriad factors come into play. Your organization might be aiming for government funding, marshaling support from the local government, trying to fundraise, or seeking to motivate staff. Given these circumstances, it can be easy to get confused or try to do too much at once.

That’s why it’s important to slow down and spend time thinking about the goal for every PR campaign. While a single organization might have a few different PR campaigns going on at once, each should have a clear ultimate goal.

These objectives are vital because they act as a beacon for your team. Only by considering the goal of a given campaign will you be able to determine who the target audience is and craft an appropriate message that will resonate with them. Your team’s ability to follow through on these goals will define your PR campaign’s ultimate success or failure.

Define your audience

Defining the audience for your PR campaigns can be tricky in the healthcare context because work in these settings tends to deal with a lot of different stakeholders. PR professionals must keep the general public in mind, but also board members, department heads, doctors, nurses, patients, outside staff, and even the government. 

This means your audience for PR campaigns isn’t always going to be the same. Sometimes, you will be able to convey a single message to all, while at other times, you might need to aim your message just at doctors or patients. This is why having a clear goal will help you figure out who your target audience should be for any given effort.

Figuring out precisely what audience your PR efforts should reach is critical. If the wrong people receive your message, then you’ve wasted time and resources sending it at all.

Prepare for the unexpected

While organizations in all fields should develop PR strategies to deal with the unexpected, this is 10 times more important in healthcare where the stakes are often much higher. Many things can go wrong — the death of a patient during an operation, the injury of an individual on the job, or the leaking of a chemical from a hospital lab, to name just a few.

Taking a proactive approach and creating a PR strategy for such adverse events can help you keep a level head and act in a calm, composed manner during an emergency. Your plan should identify all the things that could possibly go wrong, as well as who the spokesperson should be in each case. 

You should also include examples of effective messaging that can be adapted to the particular situation. To the best of your ability, answer the who, what, where, when, and why.

Hopefully, you will never actually have to use your crisis communications plan, but in a crisis, there usually isn’t time to do a lot of research and brainstorm potential solutions. That’s why it’s necessary to have these tools in place before one happens. 

Every time a crisis erupts, PR experts are the heroes in capes who swoop in to save the day, answering the public’s questions, soothing shareholders’ concerns, and controlling the situation — but only if they plan ahead.

PR: An essential part of healthcare

PR professionals specializing in healthcare understand your medical practice or organization from the inside out. Their guidance can help you not only manage unexpected events but also steer your future in whatever direction you desire, which is why doing PR is an essential part of healthcare and should also be an essential part of your practice.

— Thomas Mustac is OtterPR's medical and health industry PR specialist. He previously held positions at the Dr. Oz Show and New York Medical College. He has his Master's Degree from Iona College and received an Advanced Certification in Nonprofit Public Relations. His diverse background includes the healthcare, pharmaceutical, telehealth, tech, cosmetics, sports, and interior design industries.