CHAPTER 28
Crisis Communications Management
Erin Terjesen
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A CRISIS IS AN ELEVATED or significant threat to operations with potential negative consequences if not handled effectively. Emerging from a communication crisis with your urgent care business’s reputation intact is both critical and possible.
Prevention is the key to living through a corporate communications crisis and emerging to tell the story. A crisis threatens an urgent care company’s reputation, stature, and relations with key stakeholders, medical or business staffers, or patients. Escalation of an issue to a true crisis is typically the result of a management failure to respond appropriately to an issue, emergency, or accident in a timely manner and with the proper communication.
To manage your crisis, you can choose to let others (most likely less qualified than you) tell your story, or you can be prepared and willing to step in front of the microphone and control the message yourself.
Health-care-related organizations that respond proactively (that is, before a crisis develops) and appropriately to issues, accidents, or emergencies are far less likely to experience a crisis. Organizations that handle the situation well can actually enhance their reputations, strengthen their company’s position, and even boost consumer trust and loyalty after a crisis is navigated or eliminated.
Urgent care organizations can minimize and mitigate their risks by clearly defining management controls and policies that govern issues such as ethics, equal opportunity, and workplace safety. Failure to address these issues appropriately or manage these risks increases the potential for an urgent care organization to experience a crisis.
Normally, only organizations that “don’t get it” (fail to respond appropriately to a challenge) or that try to avoid issues by using a head-in-the-sand approach fail to communicate and ultimately reach the crisis stage.
But it is much easier to recognize a crisis than it is to prevent one. That is why teaming your urgent care leadership team with public relations (PR) and corporate communications professionals for a plan and a roadmap is critical to understanding how crises arise and to reducing risk.