Crisis Communications

How I learnt my lesson the hard way…

I am currently employed as the marketing and communications manager of a privately owned medical company which focuses on the diagnosis of osteoporosis (brittle bone disease). We operate from a variety of clinics throughout W.A., N.S.W. and S.A. Along with our fixed sites, the company runs mobile bone-density screening van (similar to the breast-screen van) for the rural patients of WA. We are the only company that provides this service to rural Western Australians, something I am very proud to be a part of.

Regrettably our screening van was recently involved in a serious road accident and was completely written off (don’t worry, the technician driving the van will make a full recovery). As such, we have been in full swing of crisis management back in head office.

Unfortunately there was no crisis plan in place when the van crashed and the company manager was away on holiday; as a result I felt like I was the blind leading the blind. After about an hour of everyone sitting around in shock we decided to work out a plan of action. I was responsible for the communication side of things but literally had no idea on how we were going to move forward. I can genuinely say it is not an ideal situation to be in but definitely a great way to gain some hands-on experience…

Obviously there were a lot of stakeholder groups who were going to be affected by the van crash (patients, referring doctors, rural hospitals, nurses, employees, community groups, shire councils, senior’s centres etc). A lot of thought needed to go into how we would prioritise contacting these groups, and what messages we would communicate to them in regards to the crash and our future plans. As a 22 year old university student it was the first time I feared I had perhaps bitten off a little more then I could chew with this job.

To put things in perspective I have used our patients as an example of one stakeholder group who would be dramatically affected by the crash. Below are some of the factors we considered in the communications plan for this group. I was devastated to hear that the replacement of our van would take at least three months; this meant cancelling over 300 patients for April alone. Considering our call centre is made up of two full-time staff members and one part-time worker – 300 cancellations for just April is A LOT.

• Whose responsibility would the cancellations be?

I felt it was important to consider which staff member had the best temperament for the job. Cancelling hundreds of appointments is not an easy or pleasant task – it requires a high degree of understanding, patience and empathy. Some of our patients had already been waiting a few months for the van to arrive and were likely to be upset by having their appointments postponed for many months more.

• Who do we call first?

We simply did not have the time and resources to call everyone at once; we needed to create and implement a plan of ‘phone-call’ priorities.
I think it was safe to assume that bad news travels quickly in small regional towns – such as the ones we have been planning to visit. Also, people don’t like to think they are unimportant or have been ‘forgotten.’ Basically this meant that as soon as we called to cancel one patient from a particular town – all the patients from that town needed to be contacted also.

• What messages were we going to communicate to our patients?

The crash had been labelled as ‘freak accident’ by the police but it was still necessary to apologise for the inconvenience and communicate our genuine regret about not being able to visit as scheduled. We needed to reassure the patients of our intentions to re-establish the service as soon as possible; bone scans are very important to rural people with osteoporosis, who do not have access to scans without the van.

The crash was a really good ‘hands-on’ experience for me and a bit of a wake up call for our company. It exposed a massive problem when it came to crisis management and communication; simply that we did not have any plans in place. We could have prevented a lot of stress and confusion if we had some sort of arrangement to work with. I have learned that employees (including myself) tend to panic a lot more when there is no plan in place and no set procedure to follow.

Although it is impossible to accurately predict these types of situations, even a basic generic plan would have been useful to have on hand. As soon as we sat down and worked out how we would move ahead things calmed down dramatically.

On a brighter note; if the van crashes (and I really hope it doesn’t!) we’ll at least know what to do straight away…

Until next time,

Ashleigh Coyle
Marketing, Communications Manager AND Crisis Communications Extraordinaire (… joking)