Effective public relations (PR) enables healthcare providers and professionals to uphold a trustworthy public perception. However, its significance becomes even more pronounced within healthcare advocacy. This is because advocacy extends beyond the immediate healthcare participants, reaching into communities and the broader public.

Also, shining a spotlight on healthcare advocacies through public relations (PR) is a crucial strategy to raise awareness, educate the public, and garner support for important healthcare issues. PR involves creating and maintaining a positive image and reputation for healthcare advocacy organizations, as well as promoting their goals and messages effectively.

To succeed, healthcare advocacies need to rouse the public to action, regardless of what the healthcare system is like at the moment or how the public perceives a certain cause.

Here's a guide on how to use PR to highlight healthcare advocacies:

• It’s able to simplify complex concepts. Health issues can be intimidating to the layman. Advocacies succeed when they effectively break down complex concepts so that their intended audience is able to understand them. This step is crucial to encouraging action; people will not respond unless they understand the gravity or value of a cause.
• It creates an emotional connection. Explaining how a drug, treatment, or innovation works is not enough. People naturally respond more readily to something that evokes an emotion.
• It’s done through persuasive storytelling. An effective advocacy tells a compelling story. It humanizes health-related concepts and helps enable healthcare providers to connect with their audience.
• It’s communicated through relevant channels. It won’t work when you’re using channels where your audience isn’t. For example, an omni-channel approach that allows you to broadcast information on various social media platforms, as well as through email and offline interaction, is great for advocacies that aim for a wide reach, such as a nationwide or international audience.

PR in Healthcare Advocacy

Here are three key areas where good PR is integral in healthcare advocacies:

Patient Education

PR is crucial in patient education. It enables healthcare providers to teach patients about diseases, innovations in healthcare and treatment, as well as the role that they play in advocating for their own well-being and disease prevention.

This is done through consistent, persuasive, and targeted communication and storytelling. Good PR also helps build relationships between healthcare providers and patients, which gives healthcare providers a platform that guarantees the attention and trust of the audiences they need to reach.

Without the credibility that PR helps shape for healthcare practitioners, it’s doubly challenging to command the attention of an audience that doesn’t consider health a priority. This is especially true for a Filipino audience, with 14 million families considering themselves poor.

A huge challenge in pushing for education among Filipino patients is trying to convince an audience that would rather ignore their symptoms, resort to medically unproven alternative medicines, or self-medication. This, however, can be addressed with PR best practices that send a strong message to a targeted audience.

Creating Awareness

Many healthcare advocacies are centered around disseminating information on health issues, such as a disease or a new treatment.

Take for example pharmaceutical company MSD Philippines’ move to launch Molnupiravir at the height of the COVID pandemic. Through a high-impact and multi-channel awareness campaign, over 9,000 people learned of the benefits of the drug to manage and treat mild symptoms.

This can only be done through effective PR strategies, such as the following:

• Know your audience. Spreading information should begin by knowing who your audience is and determining community sentiment about the issue at hand. For instance, if you’re trying to battle disinformation about a drug that’s critical to saving lives during an epidemic, you have to know the root of the disinformation, why your audience fell for it, and who they’re listening to.
• Develop compelling content. How you tell your story matters just as much as what your story is. Good PR will enable you to create content that drives people to action, encourages positive feelings about your message, and starts discussions throughout your intended communities.
• Use the right spokespersons. Your choice of health advocates, influencers, or ambassadors will greatly impact how well your message is received. They need to have credibility in the field or be relatable to your audience for people to listen.
• Show empathy. The message has to come from a place of empathy and genuine concern for your audience’s well-being. Without this, you would only be promoting a product or service.

Advancing Public Health

We mentioned the challenge that health advocates face when addressing issues among an audience that’s more concerned about putting food on the table than being healthy. But that’s not the only hurdle in health advocacy that PR plays a major role in tackling. There are more, including:

• The stigma attached to certain conditions and diseases. Filipinos remain highly conservative as a nation. And sadly, this has brought about the stigma attached to certain conditions, such as those related to mental health.
• Taboos in society. Another major hurdle in healthcare advocacy is societal taboos, such as conversations about sexuality or sexually transmitted diseases. These require careful and sensitive communication, as well as knowing how to effectively bridge healthcare providers and audiences that refuse to get help.
• Misinformation. With information readily available online, false information can quickly spread. Health advocates need to be able to battle through wrong beliefs and mindsets in order to reshape the thinking of their audience–for their own good.

PR helps health advocates to convey their message with empathy and compassion when patients are afraid to ask for help, when necessary conversations are scarce, and when people fighting illnesses need to find timely support.

Going back to our earlier example, MSD Philippines, the breakthrough oral drug Molnupiravir campaign not only created awareness but also pushed in-depth education on the importance of timely treatment and addressed a widespread reluctance among Filipinos to undergo COVID-19 vaccination.

Why PR, Not Advertising for Healthcare Advocacy?

But is it really necessary for people to know about healthcare advocacies? And why is PR the way to make them known, not advertising?

There are three main reasons why:

Invites a Wider Audience to Join

A PR campaign allows healthcare providers to highlight advocacies that benefit a greater audience, not just a select few, namely their patients.

For instance, if you’re running an awareness campaign, you’d want more people to take part–and not just in using the services or products that you provide. The focus, instead, is benefiting the audience that you’re addressing.

Maintains Authenticity

PR is a sustained, long-term effort that centers on trust, credibility, and authenticity. Using paid ads and marketing techniques disrupts this. It no longer looks like you’re advocating for a cause. Instead, the focus becomes building your name or your products and services.

In advocacy, it’s the other way around: Being of service for the public’s well-being. Building a name that people trust results simply from it.

Advocacies Need Network-Building

You would also employ PR in healthcare advocacy because it allows for coalition building among the community, stakeholders, and even policymakers. Advertising using short-term promotional methods may give health-related causes a start, but they need sustained efforts to generate quality results and effect lasting change.

Want to know more about how PR can bring your healthcare advocacies to life? Get in touch with a PR agency in the Philippines with over 25 years of success in telling compelling, impactful stories through integrated marketing communications.