When nurses at four Washington, D.C., area hospitals went on a 48-hour strike two weeks ago, the provider system's corporate PR engine raced into fifth gear with crash media training exercises and evolving core messages to respond to the nurses' damaging "quality of care" claims.
Starting Oct. 17, about 78 nurses picketed outside of Prince George's Hospital Center, the flagship provider site for Dimensions Health Corp., which also manages Greater Laurel-Beltsville Hospital, Gladys Spellman Nursing Home and Bowie Health Center in the D.C. area. Prince George's Hospital and Laurel-Beltsville Hospital operated with about half of their nurses during the two-day strike.
Prior to the strike, the facilities' nurses followed strike guidelines and gave administrators a 10-day notice outlining their "staff redesign" concerns by the hospital system. The nurses had been working for two years without a contract and negotiations had failed to produce a contractual agreement they were comfortable with.
By the time the media caught wind of the strike, the nurses union (Professional Staff Nurses Association of Maryland) that represents the system's 700 nurses, turned the gripe into a quality of care issue. "The patients are getting sicker and there are fewer people to take care of them" said Larry Grosser, director of the nurses union, to the Washington Post, the day the story broke. And on day two of the strike, Debbie Wilkes, a neonatal intensive care nurse on the picket line, slammed the Hospital Center to the Post, exclaiming: "In the past, there have been cutbacks in support staff. They got a reduction in costs by increasing the workload of the nurses. The quality of care has not improved, it's gotten worse!"
In total, about 30 to 40 local print and broadcast stories covered the strike, reaching as far south as Baltimore, according to Lisa Schiller, who organized the PR task force for Dimension. "Overall the stories were balanced [in their coverage] but there was a decent amount of media sympathy shown to the nurses union," said Schiller.
On a grassroots level (especially on the East Coast), nurses strikes and other defensive measures are becoming more prevalent in healthcare's managed care environment, according to Joan Meehan, director of communications for the American Nurses Association (ANA), who didn't have firm numbers on the number of strikes nationwide but pointed out that there needs to be stronger "whistle-blower" protections in place for nurses who risk losing their jobs when quality of care becomes an issue.
Briefing the Key Players
Although dealing with strike threats is not foreign territory for Dimensions, this 48-hour walkout represented the first time in a while the nurses made good on the warning.
To gear up, Schiller briefed the HR department and key administrators on the strike. She also quickly responded with a press release to the nurses' union newsletter and notified key board members of the strike and Dimensions' plan of action.
But most of her PR energy was spent on crafting core talking points and messages and then training Dimensions' two spokespersons, Shirley Morgan, VP of inpatient nursing at Prince George's Hospital Center, and Ana Scanlon, VP of nursing at Laurel-Beltsville Hospital. "We had to be emphatic about our position on the 'quality of care' issue to the media," said Schiller.
Initially the PR messages focused on:
- Dimensions' nurse staffing strategy to remain "fully operational" during the strike;
- maintaining the system's "business as usual" stature; and
- reminding the public that the strike didn't affect all of the system's nurses; a significant number of nurses came to work during the strike.
Then the PR strategy went into "clarification mode" as Scanlon and Morgan directed media attention to the nurses' original contractual complaints.
In the midst of the brouhaha, the hospital opted to permanently replace nine nurses that struck. This power move generated a second wave of media coverage that gave the nurses union another opportunity to "wage a media war," according to Schiller. These issues are being addressed with Dimensions defending its position by saying it had to move forward and replace as few nurses as possible.
All of the nurses who struck have returned to work (except the nine who were replaced), and a federal mediator has been appointed to resolve the outstanding contractual issues. (Dimensions, 301/925-7000)
Surviving a Strike
When your hospital's "quality of care" reputation is on the line, "be completely open and accessible" to the media, says Lisa Schiller, VP of corporate communications for Landover, Md.-based Dimensions Health Corp. who recently endured a 48-hour nurses strike. Schiller offers these survival PR tips:
- Develop core media messages on the hospital's position. Inevitably, these messages will need to evolve to address specific negative attacks.
- Role play with key spokespersons. Be tough by asking the worst-case scenario media questions.
- Be emphatic about what the real issues are. Although "quality of care" attacks can be tempting media hooks, re-direct the media to the "nuts and bolts" of the dispute (contractual problems, salary disagreements, etc.).