Health and Medical Public Relations

Myc Riggulsford

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780415613309
• eBook ISBN: 9781136501258
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Health and Medical Public Relations takes a fresh look at media relations and news values. It examines how information about medical research from the academic, pharmaceutical and charitable sectors is disseminated to target audiences through a variety of PR techniques. Scrutinising a wide range of health-related public relations activities, the book combines a critical, analytical and cultural overview of these methods with helpful guidance on their practical application.

Key features include:

• Advice on how to write and place effective press releases, plan and budget for campaigns, and anticipate responses from different sectors and the wider public
• Coverage of different types of communication and consultancy, including the controversial areas of lobbying and access to influential policy makers
• Case studies on the way in which experienced journalists and public relations practitioners gain coverage for their work, with plentiful examples drawn from both recent media scares and long-running issues
• A survey of the way challenging public relations issues have been perceived in the past, analysing the attitudes of both legislators and the public
• A user-friendly format designed to reinforce learning, including handy tips, definition boxes explaining key words and concepts, and exercises and reflection points to stimulate group discussion and reflection on specific examples of science and medical PR practice.

Wide-ranging and highly accessible, this book will be an essential resource for undergraduates, postgraduates and professionals learning to specialise in health public relations.

Part I

Health PR in context

1 What is PR?

An introduction to public relations

When I first became aware of the existence of public relations as a distinct activity that grown adults could actually be paid for performing it was still in its early youth as a management discipline. In those dark days it was roughly described as ‘managing internal and external communications’, which really meant ‘sending out press releases to the media, and maybe in-house produced newsletters to customers, and possibly letting the staff know stuff too’. Or, in radical, bleeding-edge thinking, for campaigning organisations or ones dealing with any sensitive issues, as ‘managing our interests and protecting the organisation’s reputation’.

By 2013, definitions of public relations have become more widely accepted, and the industry has matured somewhat. So, according to the UK public relations industry’s professional trade body, the Chartered Institute of Public Relations (at which point I have to declare an interest, as I have been a member for more than 15 years and once gave a breakfast seminar on pressure groups and issue management at their annual conference), public relations is

about reputation – the result of what you do, what you say and what others say about you.

Public relations is the discipline which looks after reputation, with the aim of earning understanding and support and influencing opinion and behaviour. It is the planned and sustained effort to establish and maintain goodwill and mutual understanding between an organisation and its publics.¹

Just in case this statement is too difficult for its own practitioners to understand, the CIPR then goes on to define what it means by each of the trickiest jargon terms in this definition:

‘Organisation’ can be a government body, a business, a profession, a public service or a body concerned with health, culture, education – indeed any corporate or voluntary body large or small.

‘Publics’ are audiences that are important to the organisation. They include customers – existing and potential; employees and management; investors; media; government; suppliers; opinion-formers.

‘Understanding’ is a two-way process. To be effective, an organisation needs to listen to the opinions of those with whom it deals and not solely provide information. Issuing a barrage of propaganda is not enough in today’s open society.

My first proper public relations boss, an ex-sports reporter called Tony Court, defined it to me way back in 1980 as: ‘If you pay for the space and claim in a newspaper that you are brilliant, that’s advertising. But if you can get someone else to say that you are brilliant, in an editorial, that’s public relations.’

Tony’s attitude recognised the pragmatic if unpalatable truth that it doesn’t really matter what people should think, it matters what they do think, even if that opinion is based on false or erroneous information. Thus public relations activity is at the mercy of the wisdom of crowds – if people think that something is wrong, even if it isn’t, then you are going to have to do something about it.

Of course, by 2013, most students of public relations no longer go to the CIPR or the other industry bodies’ own websites, or even to cynical former sports hacks, as the first port of call for their information. Rather, they go to that crowdsourced favourite fount of all knowledge, Wikipedia.

As a minor digression, it is telling that one of the first major contributions to theoretical thinking on the subject of public relations from the new chief executive of the CIPR, Jane Wilson, who was, among other posts, the former director of communications for Capital Radio in London, has been on the subject of Wikipedia. And her thoughts were placed elegantly in that mainstream media outlet, the Huffington Post, on 6 February 2012.

Wilson wrote: ‘Wikipedia is the world’s fifth most-read website. It is an online encyclopaedia with over 20 million articles and often the first port of call for millions of people researching a topic, individual or company.’² Jane’s contribution pointed out that Wikipedia therefore has enormous influence on an organisation’s reputation and therefore it is also understandable that public relations people are interested in it as a way of taking the temperature of public opinion. And for precisely that reason it is basically unethical for public relations executives to be editing Wikipedia entries that refer to their clients as part of their PR activity. As Jane says:

[It] is questionable whether it is ever right for a retained advocate to edit a Wikipedia page that relates to their employer or client … the neutral point of view rule is clear. It amounts, in my mind, to a ‘thou shalt not edit’ for public relations professionals. An encyclopaedia should not be leveraged for competitive advantage, whatever your perspective, or point of view. Those wishing to interact with the Wikipedia community must first understand it.

Public relations professionals must be clear about its aims and ambitions, and before engaging they need to adopt its etiquette. You do not have to accept mistakes or misunderstandings on Wikipedia, but you do not have the right to edit the content so that it reflects what you want it to say. Wikipedia is not going to provide a public relations professional with a quick win for a client or employer. Accepting that and explaining it should now become part of our professional etiquette.

I entirely agree with Jane Wilson, and also with her savvy choice of the Huffington Post as a showcase for these essentially new media sentiments. The world is changing, and changing again, and the government diktat school of press freedom has no place in today’s society. And neither has the deficit model of communication (if they just knew more they would like us better), as practised for so long in science, and medical, and health communications.

As I was finishing this book the debate moved forward and the CIPR now has draft guidelines for editing and using Wikipedia.³

So to return to the main point, a working definition of what public relations actually is, or should be. Wikipedia itself defines public relations as:

Public relations (PR) is the practice of managing the flow of information between an organization and its publics. Public relations provides an organization or individual exposure to their audiences using topics of public interest and news items that do not require direct payment. Their aim is often to persuade the public, investors, partners, employees and other stakeholders to maintain a certain point of view about the company, its leadership, products or of political decisions. Common activities include speaking at conferences, winning industry awards, working with the press, and employee communication.⁴

Actually on the day I checked, some lovesick wag had inserted the word ‘aileen’ instead of ‘practice’ in the first line. And it will have changed by now anyway. Which neatly encapsulates the twin-edged sword of encouraging interaction as a way of building brand awareness and loyalty by getting crowds to participate. This opening definition is mainly culled from the highly respected industry textbook by James Grunig and Todd Hunt called Managing Public Relations, first published in 1984 and still in print today.⁵ This book remains an eminent source of underpinning theory for the practice of public relations.

And in my view, the aim of managing information is a fairly honest and workaday description of much of public relations’ aim. In passing, I particularly liked the Wikipedia contributor’s cynical ‘speaking at conferences, winning industry awards’ as the key examples of common public relations activity, doubtless also destined to be deleted by industry worthies.

Modern definition of public relations

The Public Relations Society of America announced ‘a modern definition of public relations’ on 1 March 2012 in an article by Stuart Elliott in the New York Times,⁶ followed by a press release from the PRSA itself dated three days later, with links on its website suggesting that the New York Times article was published on 2 March, which seems an altogether odd practice for a communications industry body.

The new definition, chosen from 927 definitions submitted during the four-month industry and community consultation exercise, which drew 1,447 votes (46 per cent of which eventually chose this new definition from among the top three), called Public Relations Defined,⁷ says:

Public relations is a strategic communication process that builds mutually beneficial relationships between organisations and their publics.

The response to this redefinition has been predictably critical among bloggers and those on the industry chat forums, who seem to feel that the new definition is simply ‘more of the same’ rather than a radical redefinition suitable for the internet and social media age. Several commentators have been critical of the ‘corporate speak’ language used, rather than plain English.

The PRSA itself also seemed surprised that the consultees rejected the word ‘ethics’ as part of the definition. However, ethics is a concern that might be expected to feature more highly in discussions of medical and health communications, than in PR activities for other areas of business.

Communications skills

So public relations is about communicating in some planned way, and about trying to manage how others see us. But how should this apply to health and medical activities? And why should doctors, nurses, scientific researchers, or the entire pharmaceutical industry, wish to involve themselves in so grubby an activity? Surely all proper medical news is published in peer-reviewed journals and undertaken as part of a noble and self-sacrificing higher calling, rather than as a tawdry, commercial, money-chasing transaction?

Unfortunately, the interested publics have become rather more interested in health and medical practices than many members of the noble Hippocratic professions feel that they should be. The ability to communicate with ordinary members of the public such as government representatives and patients has almost entirely withered in some of the members of our associated medical professions. As some wit said back in the late 1980s when I was still working in the NHS: ‘Consultants are now having to give communication skills training to their junior doctors. Being taught communication skills by the average NHS consultant is a bit like being taught to fly by a pastry chef.’

We need to communicate our science, our research, our ethics and our intentions better, and we may well have to do this using both conventional media such as television, radio, newspapers, and public debates, and the newly enabled internet and telecommunications platform-based social media.

This book is therefore an attempt to demystify some of the everyday practices of public relations practitioners, and among other things, offer a self-help guide to publicising stuff in a practical manner through various media. It is decidedly not another highly technical, theoretical, and esoterically academic textbook, replete with arcane references and endnotes.

Readers who were hoping for another explanation of the history and theoretical underpinnings of the practice of public relations as such are referred to my old friend Prof Anne Gregory, former President of the Chartered Institute of Public Relations, for almost any of her excellent publications over the last 25 years. Her sound and solid work is underpinned by a thorough knowledge of the subject, and she more than almost anyone else has helped public relations to develop into a highly respectable academic discipline. Do read her excellent textbooks. This volume is instead about the craft, practice, and practical side of public relations activity, an area that often seems to get missed.

Profession or trade?

One of the first questions that I usually get asked by dewy-eyed public relations students when I am speaking as a visiting lecturer to eager classes is ‘Do you believe that public relations is a profession, or is it a trade?’ This reflects the point in their degree teaching at which I am asked to come and give a seminar, and is also the pressing essay question that they have to answer this week.

My old-fashioned view is that the professions are properly a small and distinct group of businesses in which the practitioner is putting her own professional reputation, her credibility and either her own money or her own life on the line. So a professional soldier, a partner in a law or accountancy firm, do count as such, since the principals stand to lose their own money, lives, or livelihood.

If you are risking other people’s money, with limits on that risk (such that your clients, creditors and suppliers are the ones most likely to suffer any lasting financial loss as a result of your mistakes), and if you are accepting a salary or regular wage, pension and all the usual employment protections, then you should do the best possible job that you can, but you should probably not think that you are in a profession. You are a journeyman, a businesswoman, a competent tradesman, or hopefully an artisan practising your craft. Or possibly, in 2013, bankers, who have lately earned a whole taxonomic class of their own, outside the realms of normal society.

The title ‘profession’ or ‘professional’ should perhaps be reserved as an honorific awarded by your grateful clients or possibly your working partners in the media, not a self-designated title to make you feel better about pursuing an ordinary commercial calling, or as a spin doctor. Our own consultancy is structured as an unlimited liability partnership.

As a journeyman, an artisan, what craft skills should you hone and what activities will you be expected to undertake? One of the most compelling arguments for public relations activity as an ethical practice takes its justification from the concept of advocacy in the law courts – which suggests that everyone has the right to a fair trial.

Western society says that everyone should be allowed legal representation to put the mitigating factors of their case, no matter how heinous a crime they have committed, or are accused of. There may be extenuating circumstances that have contributed to the criminal’s actions and that may be taken into consideration when passing sentence, such as dire need, coercion, or simply ignorance.

So, for instance, stealing is wrong. But stealing a loaf of bread to feed your starving children, when the theft is from a very rich person’s house where ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of figures
• Author's note and acknowledgements
• Part I Health PR in context
• Part II Media relations
• Part III Communicating health in theory and practice
• Part IV Health and medical PR in society
• Part V A bit of history
• Index