The many faces of health PR

As a profession, health PR covers a lot of ground. The specialty can involve working for a pharmaceutical company, a hospital or clinic, a research institution, or even a consumer products company making things like vitamins.

Working for a health clinic or hospital, for example, could involve tasks such as translating medical-speak into language that makes sense to those of us without medical degrees. It can also means balancing HIPAA patient privacy rules with the public’s desire for information. One spokeswoman for a well-known medical institute tells me that, despite what one might expect, part of her health pr job involves keeping the media out of the hospital. Sometimes a patient will agree to be interviewed in his or her room without getting permission the institute itself – and that means PR representatives have to intervene when that camera crew shows up, since filming inside the facility requires a lot of extra work to make sure no other patients are recorded without their express consent. She said other parts of her job involve coordinating with the media and arranging interviews with doctors about, say, a cutting-edge new surgical tool. She said that she’s seen several instances where, after months and months of working with a news outlet, the story won’t run at all. But, given the exciting and important nature of medicine, that sort of experience is surely more the exception than the rule. And that’s got to be one of the more satisfying parts of working in health PR – that so much of what your organization or client is doing is, undeniably, news.

Health PR can span beyond strictly health-related topics, too. In at least one instance and probably more, a local hospital’s PR reps spent a lot of their time doing public outreach and media relations about the funding for and construction of a new hospital wing. The project had been in the works for years, confronted various zoning issues and received some federal funding (if memory serves); the hospital’s health PR representatives found themselves answering questions on a range of topics that had nothing to do with the patient issues or medical equipment they thought they’d be dealing with when they applied for their jobs. In that regard, health PR is like a lot of other kinds of PR – doing the job well requires you to be whip-smart, quick on your feet and ready for anything.