COMMUNICATION

Developing an Easy-to-Use Crisis Communications Plan that Works for You

Where is your department’s crisis communications plan? Could you put your hands on it within five minutes? When was it last updated? If your answers to these questions weren’t exactly reassuring, you’re not alone.

"A crisis communications plan is one of the most critical documents that hospital marketing and communications departments own, and most of us don’t really know where it is, and aren’t really sure if it’s updated,” said Ashley Johnson, a communications strategist with Ten Adams, during a session on crisis communications at the SHSMD Connections Conference in September 2022.

There are many reasons for having a clear, easily accessible, easy-to-use and updated crisis communications plan, including preparedness, avoiding confusion and the inevitability of crisis—but critically, it is also essential to accreditation, Ms. Johnson notes. "If you want to be reimbursed for services, if you want Medicaid and Medicare to be accepted at your facility, if you want to maintain your accreditation, their standards require use of an emergency management program. You don’t own the emergency management program, but you do own a substandard within the accreditation manual. You have to have a crisis communications plan, and you have to have thought through how you are going to talk to the external community and the internal community.”

When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, the communications team at Ohio-based Kettering Health had been preparing to update their crisis communication plan but then found that they had no time to do so because they were too busy doing COVID-19 crisis communication. "A lot of things had to wait so we could respond to an ongoing crisis,” notes Catherine Morris, Kettering Health’s manager of communications and public relations. "We learned a lot as a team during COVID about crisis communications, and developed so much documentation to the point that we started calling our crisis communications folder a ‘junk drawer.’ We wanted to take all of those things and put them in one cohesive document, a central resource scalable to any crisis. And it had to be easy to understand, so a new marketing team member could look at the plan and immediately know how they could support crisis communications.”

Ms. Morris’ team reached out to Ten Adams for help creating such a plan, and they identified several key principles: 

1. Define roles and responsibilities. Do not preassign people to specific tasks. "What happens when that person leaves and they’re the only one who knows how to do that function and where the plan is?” Ms. Johnson says. She recommends four general roles:
   • Incident command/public information officer, responsible for leading messaging,
   • Public relations, responsible for coordinating media interviews and serving as a liaison with external organizations,
   • Digital lead, responsible for managing and monitoring social media and web activity,
   • Marketing/creative lead, responsible for creating and updating incident-related graphics and signage and managing photography and videography.
2. Develop a resource tool kit that is easily usable. "What happens in the first 30 seconds of a crisis? Everyone loses their minds,” Ms. Johnson notes. "That’s why you make easy documents in Microsoft Word. It can’t rely on an Adobe product or something complicated. It has to be something anybody can access, use and edit.” Kettering Health’s includes spreadsheets for tracking media requests, a packing list for the media center, a media contact list, user names and passwords for different social media accounts, and a list of most likely crisis events by facility.
3. Create a "quick-start guide.” Ms. Johnson explains that "you will need all the details in the tool kit later, but when the crisis first hits, you need 1-2-3 quick-start instructions that are so basic that anyone can use them. You may not be the first person on scene, either physically or virtually. What if it’s your brand-new employee who has only been there two weeks?” The quick-start guide should include a list of roles that need to be activated immediately in a crisis, ideally with at least three people per role (in case someone is on vacation or otherwise unavailable) and their cellphone numbers. The other key component of a quick-start guide is "what do I do and where do I go next?” with answers divided by role.
4. Establish a training program to work through your plan. "If you are an accredited hospital, your whole health system must be practicing your crisis and emergency operations plan once a year,” Ms. Johnson says. "I would recommend that your internal communications and marketing team, whatever it consists of, have a separate practice at least once a year.” This should include reviewing the entire plan to ensure that all the information remains up-to-date, including phone numbers. It should also involve a review of what the plan is kept and how it is accessed. 

"Your team can also do a tabletop exercise and talk through how you would respond in example situations. By definition, a crisis means something has failed and your infrastructure might not be doing what it usually does. For example, what if a tornado took out the south side of town and six employees are out, and you’ve lost power and there’s no cellphone service? Have someone come in and run scenarios for your team so you can think them through and make backup plans for your backup plans.”

Have plans for a designated media staging and briefing area away from the hospital command center and patient care areas, and be prepared to set it up quickly. "It shouldn’t be a surprise what materials you will need,” Ms. Johnson says. "You can have a pre-packed box, tub or suitcase with those things, such as podiums, branded backdrops, sound systems and white coats with the hospital logo on it because your spokesperson may not remember to bring one. Or at a minimum, have a packing list so that you can throw these things in a box and go.”

Ms. Johnson also offered several warnings about what not to do in crisis communication. "Don’t make a plan that assumes all your technology is going to work. Ensure that you have old-school methods to communicate,” she says. "Don’t assume your boss is going to run everything, because they could be gone. And don’t assume it will be over quickly. If it’s a bomb threat to your hospital, maybe it will be over in a day. But in the case of a global pandemic, say, you’ll be in crisis mode for a much longer period. You have to space out your team so that you have coverage for days, weeks or months. You can’t work 24/7 in crisis mode; it’s not safe or helpful.”

"Plan as much as you can, but know you can never fully anticipate what’s coming your way,” Ms. Morris adds. "A good crisis communications plan will give you the tools you need to manage in an unexpected situation.”