The Covid-19 pandemic had a major healthcare catastrophe and faced serious issues. Businesses and corporates have especially faced a huge challenge in the workforce. However, there were many ways in which the PR Industry has helped the healthcare industry in the matter of perception building, and managing the vaccination recognition crisis. To deliberate on the same, a stellar panel of prominent leaders of the PR and Communications industry spoke at the third edition of e4m’s PR and Corp Comm 40 under 40 Summit 2021.
On the panel were Aman Gupta-Managing Partner at SPAG; Ajey Maharaj - Group Head Corporate Communications & PR at Fortis Hospital; and Dr Rajiv Chhibber - VP External Affairs at SMT. The session was moderated by Ruhail Amin – Senior Editor at BW Business World and Exchange4media.
Kickstarting the session, Amin asked the speaker’s views on the direction in which the PR industry worked during the healthcare crisis. To this, Gupta said, “As we know that in today’s world so many conversations are happening across multiple channels for brands who are active and specific in the healthcare domain where the amount of conversation was going just through the roof to segment between what is really truth versus what might be considered as a rumour was playing havoc on the brands. You will hear a lot of things that were not factually correct. Therefore, keeping an ear to the ground was a real-time understanding of what is happening and therefore providing response mechanism to our clients was very important.”
Amin further asked Maharaj to give directions on whether the brands were able to get the sense of the road ahead to the crisis to which he said, “Covid, when it hit us last year, it was a transformation of the PR and Communications industry the way they function, and when the work from home started, it was a new experience for everyone. The last wave that had hit us was a very critical one and severe especially from a healthcare perspective. It was very critical for people to understand what kind of covid it is, when they require hospitalization, and what kind of treatment can be looked at from home itself. So the agencies played a critical role. They as a partner, ensured whatever government advisories were coming out, would be able to circulate it internally so that the doctors, paramedics and the nurses who were involved in treating the patients were aware that this is the kind of advisories and treatments which are coming and whatever the ICMR were sharing information, they were fully aware of it.”
“Our challenge was typically different which could not involve a PR agency at that point of time but we did ultimately use our agency for our benefits also. But the idea was that the entire health policy paradigm, advocacy, implementation, and enforcement required to really get into what the government want itself to really portray and we had to look at it.”, Chhibber added.
On asking about the correct tone to convey messages to the people while clearing the misinformation, Maharaj said, “There were lot of myths around vaccination. We took the help from the agencies and other bodies and community connect initiatives were also taken to ensure that people are vaccinated as it is the key to save themselves. It’s not that if you are vaccinated you will not get Covid, even if you get Covid, it will be a very mild one. That was the first critical thing that people had to be aware of. A lot of people did not understand initially, also now when the Omicron variant is coming out, it is very mild in nature. Only if someone is not vaccinated, they are impacted majorly. We have done some research studies across our organization itself and we have to come to know that people who are vaccinated got a very mild covid. That is very important for people to ensure to be aware of this fact.”
“It was not about if our profits were going up or down. That was not the case. But the case was to supply the last mile so that was another challenge.”, Chhibber noted.
Chhibber further highlighted the takeaways from the pandemic from the communication perspective by saying, “What people need to understand is that science is always changing. The virus is mutable. All knowledge is partial knowledge and what we saw in the last 18 odd months is just an illustration of that. So we need to keep on coming up with newer information and newer communication guides and we really need to be on our goals to be knowledge changers.”