With a brassy fanfare from the wings, the Healthcare Communications Association  (HCA) was launched at the Communiqué Awards last month. With the stated aim of providing "an independent forum to drive the highest standards and promote best practice, innovation and excellence in healthcare communications", the HCA has been warmly welcomed by industry.

In fact, while the impetus behind the Association came from PR agencies, half of the members of the Executive Committee are pharma company representatives. Laudable objectives but how does this new PR champion intend to achieve them? "The only way to work is to try to understand everyone's viewpoints, to encompass the needs of the industry and the needs of consultancy," said HCA chair, Catherine Warne.

"We need to look at communications as a whole. This involves input from all the stakeholders. We are not suggesting that we in the Executive Committee of the HCA can do everything but we can provide a structure. This will only work if we have the support of the industry."

This refrain is taken up by Maxine Taylor, director of corporate affairs at Eli Lilly UK: "The complexity of healthcare communications means that there is a need for a specific special interest group, especially in terms of the need for well-trained people who won't make mistakes. This can only lead towards good PR and medical education."

The HCA offers a variety of benefits to its members but two of the greatest challenges will be to provide training and devise an evaluation model. Maxine Taylor: "Training is a major issue within the industry. There are companies that provide training courses but these are very general, dealing with the media or issues management. Aside from the ABPI course, which is very technical, there isn't a forum for this.

"Healthcare is a growth sector and we need to encourage people to work with us. There are a lot of talented people coming out of university and we need to make healthcare attractive; the HCA is in a position to do this," she said. "The current PR training courses are tactical, teaching basic PR skills. We are talking about strategic training, teaching how to utilise PR effectively," said the HCA's Warne.

"We will not run courses on how to write press releases, but we will cover real issues such as buying PR effectively, the impact of PR on the marketing mix, how PR can sit alongside medical education, direct marketing, and how to cope with the changing NHS and changing regulations."

Evaluation has been a burning issue in the world of public relations for some time. Whilst there are increasingly complex methods of evaluation for other communications media, including advertising and direct marketing, the perception has been that PR is a different kettle of fish.

Maxine Taylor: "Evaluation is an area of interest to the whole industry. There is the Institute of Public Relations (IPR) Evaluation Toolkit and other efforts, but they have been focused on evaluating media relations, and we do more than just media relations. How you evaluate the output of PR is an issue that troubles all of us."

One company which has long been involved in evaluation is Shire Hall Communications. Managing director and HCA Committee member, Sarah Matthew, is passionate about evaluation: "It can be extremely frustrating to carry out a campaign and be unable to measure your success or show return on investment. In time, we found the best method was to ask the marketers to add two or three questions to their market research. This then gave us an outcome measure."

However, to ensure such techniques are employed throughout the industry, the HCA intends to provide its members with access to a bespoke evaluation model. The IPR Toolkit mentioned by Taylor has recently been brought out for a second airing, so why not use this model? "The IPR Toolkit provides an excellent starting point for evaluation; it lays out a philosophy for how you can measure PR, but I feel we need to go further," said Matthew.

"Historically, evaluation has focused on measuring outputs, such as column inches or equivalent ad spend, but I feel we should be measuring outcomes, or specific objectives of the campaign, such as increased patient presentation. All marketing and communications plans have specific outcomes set at the outset but in healthcare many of these are peculiar to this sector.

"When I worked in industry, we would always dedicate a proportion of the market research budget to measuring our promotional activity, but there was no bespoke research to measure a PR campaign. As PR is becoming an increasingly important part of marketing mix then it is vital that we have a bespoke model."

The Author:
Hugh Gosling is editor of Pharmaceutical Marketing

Kindly reproduced with permission from PMLive.com.