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