Sue Wolstenholme
Ashley Public Relations
A.Titlul lucrarii: An issues management approach to corporate social responsibility
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With this paper I am hoping to illustrate the use of two research methods to inform and develop a corporate social responsibility approach to public relations work – issues management and customer polling.
Unfortunately, public relations is often limited by definition to the ‘management of communication’. To achieve that limited definition the discipline could use issues management and apply it to corporate social responsibility but the narrowness of just being there for communication would mean that many of the deeper aspects of relationship building and maintaining that these fields offer would be wasted.
As John Peters said in his study on communication, Speaking into the Air, “Too often, “communication” misleads us from the task of building worlds together. It invites us into a world of unions without politics, understandings without language and souls without bodies, only to make politics, language and bodies reappear as obstacles rather than blessings.”[1]
Building worlds together is essential to make a relationship worthwhile – issues management helps us to know the implications of the politics and to use the language effectively and corporate social responsibility gives us the body for our ‘souls’.
B. Titlul lucrarii: A consideration of some of the implications of recreating a marketing culture in the health service?
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When I started working in the National Health Service, in the mid nineties, I undertook some research into the main threats to reputation and thereafter into the causes of the increase in medical litigation cases.
Following some context setting to describe how the situation has evolved,
this paper builds upon that earlier research and has been written to consider the key differences between public relations and marketing, using health as an illustration and the law as an example of where not to go. It also considers the rise of social marketing as the discipline becoming the one chosen in the public and governmental sectors in the UK, which still falls short of what public relations can offer.
The earlier findings directed me to focus on the internal market, developed in the 80s to create competition among health providers, that was still having a negative impact on relationships with patients ten years later.
The difference was impressive with the main finding that (simply) marketing creates consumers and spreads consumer culture, which moves relationships further away into passive states. This leads to a relationship with the responsibility on one side and the consumer taking very little of it but demanding a great deal of service, which leads from partnership and cooperation towards distance and ultimately and too often to litigation.
While there is a clear attraction for creating a service where the patient demands higher quality, it also needs to be one where the patient accepts their role and responsibility in the relationship. Some recent initiatives to build involvement, that have not had enough time or resource to prove themselves, will also be analysed including the formation of the Patient and Public Involvement Forums, which are beginning to create relationships where constructive criticism leads to improvement.
Marketing, according to this research, is not the way to build that sort of a relationship, in fact it can destroy it.
(Illustrated, among the research findings and references, by a patient who demanded the right to smoke heavily and threatened to sue if the NHS didn't make him healthy again).
Social marketing is considered and compared but that too, while not having to carry the stigma that PR has been given by the news media, still focuses upon consumers and instead of physical products it seeks to ‘sell’ ideas and behavioural change. It is thought, however, to have a possibly valuable role in health promotion, such as anti smoking campaigns and that is explored.
For the main part the paper sets out to prove that marketing, like law, has no constructive place in medicine and to introduce it again, as is being promoted at the moment in the UK, will be of far more benefit to lawyers than to doctors or patients. Medicine needs the relationship building skills and theories of public relations, not only to promote the reputation of the wider service and thereby build confidence among its users but also to develop the two-way communication that is needed for the patient doctor partnership in the 21st century – where it is no longer enough for doctor to know best.