When a crisis hits, small-town hospitals are often too overwhelmed and understaffed to tackle the crisis communications mission at hand. In the heat of a crisis, assembling a relief task force is crucial to emerging from the incident with the hospital's image intact.
Olympic Memorial Hospital in Port Angeles, Wash., and Centre Community Hospital in State College, Pa., are in the throes of scandals that have placed them under local and national media scrutiny for the first time. The crisis strategies underscore the need for developing messages that reinforce the hospital's position in the community and tapping into the community's reservoir of opinion leaders for support.
Scathing Criminal Claims
One of Olympic Memorial's most respected physicians is being investigated by local police for the eerie death of a 3-day-old infant. According to police reports, the infant was pronounced dead twice on Jan. 12 by the hospital and police are looking into a nurse's claim that Dr. Eugene Turner "manually obstructed the airway of the child."
For Olympic Memorial-which is the No. 1 employer in the market-the criminal claims are delivering devastating blows to the hospital's standing in the community.
Since early February the hospital has been blind-sided by the amount of detail local -and eventually the national media - has secured. Three newspapers in the region reported haunting accounts of how the infant died in his mother's arms after the parents agreed to halt life-support treatment.
And the fact that the parents weren't notified of the second life-saving attempts because the doctor told the nurse it would be too difficult for them to endure.
In the absence of a formal PR department, the hospital's administrator, Tom Stegbauer, has fielded media inquiries from as far away as New York and Detroit. In fact, while speaking with HPRMN, ABC News- New York was waiting outside Stegbauer's office. Although the hospital has retained PR counsel from Seattle-based Hawkins & Company to handle some of the damning allegations, Stegbauer continues to be the exclusive spokesperson stressing the tremendous complexity of the case.
For now the crisis strategy is to direct all media inquiries regarding the investigation to the hospital's attorney, a move that may not be aggressive enough to protect the hospital's image.
Clearly on the defensive and overwhelmed, Stegbauer blasted the press for irresponsible reporting (some newspapers revealed the baby's name and ran pictures of the physician) and focusing on the sensationalism of the case.
One-Woman Show
In a separate case, Wilda Stanfield, a lone PR specialist, is piecing together a crisis relief plan for Centre Community Hospital that is using image-affirming advertising and community support.
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Launching A Crisis Relief Plan Assembling the right team immediately after a crisis erupts is crucial to surviving with the hospital's image intact. Here's some crisis survival advice:
Source: Hawkins & Company, Marilyn Hawkins, 206/217-9776 |
The hospital's reputation is being bashed by its former chief of staff who is claiming that she was forced out after blowing the whistle on the facility's "needless patient deaths." Dr. Danae Powers filed suit against the hospital on Christmas eve citing three fatal cases that involved shoddy operating room procedures.
Initially, the local media coverage in early January was slanted toward the ex-chief of staff, according to Stanfield. "We were woefully understaffed, we had been without a director of PR and development for a year," she said.
The executive committee soon turned up the volume on communications initiatives. Ninety-nine doctors took out a full-page ad in three local papers signing onto a statement that stressed the hospital's high quality of medical care.
Executives wrote letters to the local newspaper in support of the hospital and in media interviews, the CEO emphasized that patients were never at risk and the lawsuit was really about administrative differences. (OMH, Tom Stegbauer, 360/417-7705; CCH, Wilda Stanfield, 814/231-3140)