External Relations – Community Relations

Poor public relations can result in impact to the care experience, reputational loss, resources and/or financial loss. This risk may lead to deterioration in the therapeutic relationship, perceived lack of public confidence, lack of community engagement and/or alignment. It may also have an impact on financial donors, as well as volunteer and/or staff recruitment. This document contains information entered by HIROC Subscriber healthcare organizations (acute and non-acute) in the Risk Register application to help you in your assessment of this risk.

Key Controls/Mitigation Strategies

Clients/Residents/Patients

  • Corporate Programs
    • Create client/resident/patient and family engagement plan
    • Ensure quality improvement plans that include improvements related to safety and patient-centred areas
    • Develop welcome package materials for clients, residents, or patients to assist in their care journey and provide relevant information to ensure understanding
    • Engage clients in collaborative care models and actively seek feedback on experience
    • Identify and collaborate with all equity-deserving groups with goals of advancing health equity, culturally safe care, and improving care experience and relations
  • Patient and Family Advisory Councils (PFACs)
    • Develop an engagement framework to ensure PFAC feedback is incorporated into strategic and quality improvement planning
    • Engage PFAC members at a corporate level and on operations committees to allow for feedback, and input on programs/services
    • Include PFAC members as part of quality improvement processes and projects

Policies, Procedures and Processes

  • Create a standard communication plan including communication strategies to manage critical and crises communications
  • Develop social media policy
  • Create external communications procedures and protocols
  • Develop whistleblower and complaint, or patient relations policy
  • Ensure disclosure process is followed
  • Incorporate Client/Resident/Patient feedback/complaint management

Regional/Community Alliances and Partnerships

  • Consider a regional approach to integrated healthcare delivery
  • Establish guiding principles to build meaningful and effective community engagement relationships
  • Ensure a community engagement strategy (outreach to health service partners, community groups, local, municipal, provincial, federal representatives and external stakeholders)
  • Consider focus groups with community members to receive feedback on programs/initiatives
  • Establish partnerships with municipal emergency control group
  • Where indicated ensure any partnership agreements are ratified
  • Increase internal community engagement capacity through relevant training and public participation
  • Plan engagement for high impact projects like master planning
  • Liaise with elected officials regarding constituent, and local catchment concerns
  • Consider utilization of internal public relations specialist
  • Examine partnerships with other organizations for fundraising events

Communication

  • Internal Communication
    • Keep staff informed and equip them with information and messaging to share with Clients/Residents/Patients and families/caregivers
    • Provide opportunities for socialization between Patient and Family Experience/Advisory Office with staff, patients, and families
    • Publicize contact information for Patient and Family Experience/Advisory Office on various platforms (e.g., website, handbook)
    • Share positive stories with board, staff, community, and external speaking engagements
    • Implement a corporate communications strategy which includes a report out to the community on key action priorities and strategic initiatives
    • Promote an online virtual platform for patient and public engagement where feedback can be shared with organizational leadership
    • Consider a regional communications team for consistent messaging and branding
    • Establish communications approval process (e.g., media releases, advisories, and social media posts)
    • Open board meetings
    • Develop a media relations strategy, including strong corporate social media presence
    • Utilize organization website and social media to share information regarding programs/initiatives
    • Explore multimodal communication plan including methods such as: email, telephone town halls, newspaper, internet, social media, digital platforms
    • Maintain media monitoring to stay abreast of trends

Feedback and Complaints

  • Maintain regular (i.e., annual) patient/family/caregiver experience evaluation surveys and action plan
  • Consider post-discharge calls and service excellence surveys
  • Provide education for leaders on complaint management and processes
  • Dedicate resources for patient experience/relations to support complaints management processes, communications
  • Establish escalation process, including on call personnel with established response timeframes for optimal service recovery
  • Attach leadership accountability agreements tied to patient experience scores
  • Incorporate input from equity deserving groups into complaints process, through navigator or PFAC roles

Monitoring/Indicators

Metrics

  • Provide data and analysis of complaints and compliments to leadership and board subcommittee
  • Create balanced scorecard metrics that incorporate care and reputational loss (e.g., wait times)
  • Promote patient experience survey satisfaction results
  • Track and identify changes to donor patterns
  • Develop patient relations process indicators, such as: satisfaction rate, time to acknowledge complaints and time to close complaints
  • Consider regular tracking and analysis of media stories, social media posts, website comments
  • Include board recruitment metrics (i.e., time to hire, source, expertise, volume, etc.)

Engagement Monitoring

  • Monitor staff engagement survey results, staff retention rate
  • Review and evaluate debriefs after crisis events
  • Incorporate community involvement measures as part of strategic planning
  • Establish executive team regular agenda item: community partnerships, complaints, media requests, etc.
  • Conduct regular meetings with stakeholders, and community partners
Date last reviewed:
This is a resource for quality assurance and risk management purposes only, and is not intended to provide or replace legal or medical advice or reflect standards of care and/or standards of practice of a regulatory body. The information contained in this resource was deemed accurate at the time of publication, however, practices may change without notice.