External Relations – Community Relations
Community relations risks in healthcare organizations relate to poor public relations and can result in an impact to the
patient care experience, reputational loss, resources and/or financial loss. This risk can be associated with deterioration in the therapeutic relationship, perceived lack of public confidence, lack of community engagement and/or alignment, financial donor impact, 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.
Ranking/ratings
- Likelihood – average score 3.41
- Impact – average score 2.56
The Risk Register allows for risks to be assessed on a five-point likelihood and impact scale, with five being the highest.
Key controls/mitigation strategies
- Patients:
- Patient and family engagement plan
- Patient and Family Advisory Council feedback and including, strategic and quality improvement planning
- Quality of Care review process for lessons learned and opportunity for improvements
- Quality improvement plans which include improvements related to safety and patient-centred areas
- Welcome package for patients to assist patient/caregiver in care trajectory to manage expectations
- Collaborative care model to engage patients, and seek feedback on patient experience
- Alliances and Partnerships:
- Regional approach to integrated healthcare delivery
- Community engagement strategy (outreach to health service partners, community groups and external stakeholders)
- Partnerships with municipal emergency control group
- Ongoing fostering of community partner relationships
- Board committee focused on philanthropic efforts
- Communication:
- Keeping staff informed and providing information and messaging they can transfer to patients/families/caregivers
- Promotion of positive patient care stories with board, staff, community and external speaking
- engagements
- Crisis communications plan
- Media relations strategy
- Proactive sharing of organization information with the community through various avenues such as: email, telephone town halls, newspaper
- Established and consistent external communication vehicles (e.g. Twitter, internet, outreach and awareness)
- Policy such as: social media, external communications, complaint management
- Consistent branding
- Regional communications team for consistent messaging
- Communications approval process (media releases, advisories, and social media posts)
- Feedback and complaints :
- Regular patient/family/caregiver experience evaluation surveys and action plan
- Post discharge calls and service excellence survey’s
- Patient feedback management policy and procedure
- Disclosure process policy and procedure
- Dedicated resources for patient experience/relations to support and role model complaints management processes, communications
- On call personnel for escalation as required
Monitoring/indicators
- Metrics
- Data and analysis of complaints and compliments
- Balanced scorecard metrics with potential for care and reputational loss (e.g. wait times)
- Patient experience survey satisfaction results
- Change to donor patterns of giving
- Patient relations process; satisfaction rate, time to acknowledge and closure
- Regular tracking and analysis of media stories; social media posts, website comments/activity
- Engagement Monitoring
- Staff engagement survey results
- Debrief after crisis events
- Community involvement in strategic planning
- Executive team regular agenda item: community partnerships
- Regular meetings with stakeholders, or partners