Organization: Good Samaritan Hospital, Dayton, Ohio
Timeframe: January-April, 2009
Over the past few years, the two major healthcare systems serving Dayton, Ohio, and surrounding areas have negotiated marketing partnership agreements with 10 local schools to provide athletic trainers for student sports programs and for naming rights of various school buildings and sports complexes.
Holly Michael, communications manager at Good Samaritan Hospital, a 600-bed nonprofit facility that covers Dayton and its northwestern suburbs, eventually heard grumbling from the community. “Some people questioned why a hospital was investing in artificial turf,” says Michael. For Good Samaritan, it was important not to be known as just a name on a football stadium. “We needed to add meat to our partnerships,” says Michael. To creatively maximize the relationships with these schools and their surrounding communities, Good Sam developed programs to connect its brand to the communities’ overall health and wellness—including free health checks and screenings for teachers and staff, support of school biomedical sciences programs and free sports physicals.
The overall goals, says Michael, were the following:
• Lift Good Samaritan’s brand image beyond sports.
• Improve the hospital’s reputation and standing within the community.
• Create positive, long-lasting relationships with the young people in the area.
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| Eager high school students from Dayton, Ohio, get ready to explore a cadaver during Good Samaritan’s “Hospital 101” program. Photo courtesy of Good Samaritan Hospital |
CAREER FOCUS
Looking to expand the school outreach, the Good Samaritan team decided to introduce career exploration as an extra component. “We thought it would be good for the students to see the healthcare industry from the inside,” says Michael, who adds that there are plenty of jobs in healthcare and that the Dayton area has been hit hard by the downturn.
Built upon a successful anatomy program developed in partnership with one school, in 2009 “Good Samaritan Hospital 101—Introduction to Careers in Health Sciences” became a four-day event that included nine schools and 130 students. The initiative included a hands-on lab with a human cadaver staffed with surgeons and a mock trauma in the emergency department (ED).
ONE-OF-A KIND PROGRAM
The first step in planning the program was research. “We conducted both a healthcare literature search and targeted Internet searches, but did not find similar programs to benchmark,” says Debbie Janis, community relations manager at Good Samaritan. In that respect, continues Janis, “it was challenging yet rewarding to create the program from scratch.”
The team worked with the coordinator of the existing anatomy program to integrate student and teacher feedback. Target schools were chosen based on existing partnership agreements, which were created as a result of data from the hospital’s research and business development groups.
101 COMPONENTS
Good Samaritan Hospital 101 would be held April 13-16, 2009, with two to three schools attending each day. Half of the day was spent in the anatomy lab, which was staffed with medical professionals who, with the students, would view details of the human body through a unique hands-on experience with a cadaver.
During the second half of the day, students would explore emergency medicine, with insights into patient assessments and treatments and the latest in medical technology. Through interactive demonstrations, students would experience a mock trauma situation encompassing an emergency resuscitation room, an ambulance squad provided by the Trotwood Fire Department and the hospital’s helicopter landing pad.
While the cadaver lab had been successfully done before on a smaller scale, the ED mock trauma and career segment was new. ED nurses volunteered their time to develop the program.
HANDS-ON EXPERIENCE
From April 13-16, the hospital brought 130 students from nine schools through the program. Each day started with a welcome in the hospital lobby by a hospital executive. Then the students split their day between the cadaver lab and the ED.
During the cadaver lab, students were able to explore the human body under the guidance of a surgeon. The experience, not for the squeamish, is one not usually afforded to students until medical school and was a memorable highlight of the program. “Some of the doctors said they never had the opportunity to look in inside a human body at such a young age,” says Michael.
The second half of the day was spent in the ED. The mock trauma scenario allowed students to get a behind-the-scenes look at a trauma and the jobs performed in emergency medicine, from the paramedics bringing the patient to the ED, to the nurses and ED staff who treated the patient, to the ED physician who managed care.
“We wanted them to really experience an emergency situation,” says Michael. “From how a person is treated at the scene, what it’s like inside an ambulance, to how a patient is transported to the helicopter pad.”
Also included in the ED experience was an interactive hazmat suit demonstration.
As well as providing the students with lunch, the hospital bought scrub shirts with the hospital’s logo and gave them to all program participants.
After the visit, the team provided a summary of student evaluations to teachers and administrators and provided a Flickr photo site link and TV clip on the schools’ individual Web sites. “We also sent individual letters offering hospital volunteer opportunities as well as information on a new student career fair in the fall,” says Michael.
LOCAL MEDIA TARGETS
The media relations goal was to generate coverage that reached 75% of communities in the hospital’s target market, supporting the hospital’s overall reputation and brand identity as the region’s hospital that is most connected to the community it serves.
Each community has a small weekly paper that focused on local news, and it was a challenge to reach each one. “Some papers are so small that one person runs the whole operation,” says Janis.
“[For the editors who couldn’t cover their local high school at the event itself,] we sent press releases targeted for each paper, and then put photos that were tagged with the high school name on Flickr for them to pick up,” she says.
As a lead-up to the event, the PR team developed a media advisory and faxed it to local TV stations.
POSITIVE REVIEWS
Based on letters written by the students post-event, the 101 program was a hit—their reaction was overwhelmingly positive. In addition, a survey asking students to grade the program garnered an average 4.75 out of a perfect 5.
The healthcare career focus also yielded positive results: the number of students interested in healthcare careers increased 10%, and 99% of students already interested in healthcare careers remained interested.
From a media outreach standpoint, the results met objectives, and more:
• Successful outreach to eight out of nine community newspapers that covered the targeted high schools, generating five front-page articles;
• Received TV coverage by Dayton CBS affiliate, reaching 100% of hospital’s target market;
• An article in “What2Be,” a health careers supplement published by the Dayton Daily News, reached 160 schools and 100% of the target market; and
• A Dayton-based publication, Healthcare Today, ran a two-page spread on the event, helping promote Good Samaritan Hospital as an innovator in community relations campaigns.
These goals were achieved on a shoestring budget. Here’s the breakdown: cadavers, $6,000; logo scrub gown giveaways; $2,160; lunch & drinks, 4 days, $1,786.59; and photography, $450, for a total of $10,396.
POSTMORTEM
Because the career theme was so successful, the team followed up in the fall with a Career Exploration Night, which drew students from all the area high schools, engaging those not involved in the 101 program.
Even more ambitious goals are on tap for this year. The team is expanding the audience to schools in disadvantaged areas that may not have partnership agreements. They’re also creating a third, non-clinical session to expose students to other hospital jobs, such as administration.
The team will also ramp up more social media components for the program, integrating Facebook and Twitter into the high schools’ Web pages. “We see that’s the preferred forum for students to talk about the event,” says Janis.
The additional school outreach will increase the total students to 240. To Michael and Janis, it was a program in which everyone benefited. “The students were happy, the doctors got plenty of attention and kudos and it demonstrated that we could go far beyond sports in our community outreach,” says Michael. PRN
CONTACT:
Holly Michael, [email protected]; Debbie Janis, [email protected].