From full-page newspaper ads to press events, hospitals say their pandemic pleas are reaching the public

Hospitals buckling under the weight of COVID-19’s worst surges say “unprecedented” messaging partnerships with competing systems—such as joint advertisements and press conferences—appear to be striking a chord with the general public.

United efforts to convey the severity of the disease, the strain it’s having on healthcare facilities and the practices individuals can use to protect themselves have become increasingly common with each uptick in local COVID-19 case counts.

In December, for instance, six Ohio provider organizations including Cleveland Clinic, University Hospitals and the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) took out a full-page ad in Cleveland-based newspaper The Plain Dealer dominated by a single word: “Help.”

Around that same time, the leaders of nine Minnesota provider organizations such as Mayo Clinic, Allina Health and Children’s Minnesota signed on to a full-page ad that was circulated throughout the state. Describing a “critical situation,” it told readers that front-line workers were “heartbroken,” “overwhelmed” and in danger of limiting their services for non-COVID-19 conditions.

Just last week in the Atlanta area, six metro-area systems representing about 40 hospitals across the state of Georgia held their second joint press briefing of the pandemic. Much like a previous media appearance in August and their joint statement issued in late December, they aimed to speak directly to the public about a spike in hospitalizations. The hospital leaders also requested ER visits and 911 calls be reserved for “true” emergencies and shared stories from front-line clinical staff.

“Our most effective approach is when we join with other systems to present a united front. This gets the attention not only of all the local media but also, at times, of national and trade media,” Leigh Hamby, M.D., chief medical officer at Atlanta-based Piedmont Healthcare, told Fierce Healthcare.

“One reporter referred to these activities as ‘unprecedented,’ as in pre-pandemic times we were all competitors. The unity and the stridency of the message appears to get across,” Hamby said.

Trish Nicolas, executive director of public relations at Wellstar Health System, said the Georgia systems began holding regular calls back in 2020 to discuss collective pandemic measures for patients and the public “because that unified voice, we thought, was going to be much more impactful—and it has been—than just each individual system.”

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The Atlanta group has released a slew of statements and op-eds across local media outlets but made its biggest splash when coming together for an in-person joint press conference at the city’s Mercedes-Benz football stadium late last summer.

“The joint press conferences were the moments where we had ‘wow,’ especially the first one in August,” she said. “The comments were just flooding in about ‘Okay, we need to take this seriously,’ ‘This is a wake-up call,’ ‘This is the first time that these systems have ever done anything like this together, I’ve never seen six competing systems get together and do something as big as this.”

'Encouraging' anecdotal feedback keep hospitals' feet on the gas

Although hospital leaders say that the joint action is being well received, they admitted feedback on the impact of their efforts has been more anecdotal than quantifiable.

Whether they’re exposed through media outreach or their own personal interactions with others, increasing the awareness of large surges with widespread community transmission “has appeared” to change the public’s behaviors, Hamby said. Although “difficult” to measure, “we also can see these tactics might have some anecdotal impact during surges via an increase in mask-wearing in public places and in people being more careful about congregating unmasked indoors in large public settings,” he said.

Nicolas said Wellstar has been able to gauge some of its reach by monitoring web traffic on its COVID-19 information pages or across its social media content. An informative COVID-19 safety rap distributed across school partners and displayed internally has racked up “tens of thousands” of views, she said, while a more targeted slam poem has picked up 92,000 views across the system’s collective social media channels.

Measuring whether these targeted and broad efforts are translating to behaviorial change, however, is a different story.

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“We do believe based on the feedback that we’re getting from some of these initiatives that it is making a difference. We just don’t have … a way to say ‘OK, vaccination rates went up today immediately following the press conference, or case rates went down 10 days afterwards,’” Nicolas said. “We don’t have a sophisticated way to correlate those things, but we will continue to do them.”

Regardless, other hospital leaders pointed to community vaccine uptake as a proxy for public awareness—and as evidence that there’s more ground to cover.

In a statement, Cleveland Clinic highlighted the 350,000-plus vaccines distributed across its sites as the payoff for its messaging partnerships with other health systems, health departments, community organizations and others.

On the other hand, Marc Gorelick, M.D., president and CEO of Children’s Minnesota, noted that roughly a third of his state’s population aged five years and older have not completed a COVID-19 vaccine series to date.

“The response from the full-page ad taken out by CEOs from nine Minnesota health systems has been encouraging,” Gorelick told Fierce Healthcare. “While we believe our messaging and outreach around vaccination is having some impact, there’s still a significant gap that needs to be addressed. Vaccination levels are nowhere near what we need them to be.”

Nicolas acknowledged that limited vaccine uptake, relaxed safety measures and the growing discussion of omicron as a “mild” variant have both frustrated and confused the front-line healthcare workers pleading for help.

“There have been moments where I’ve had physicians just say, ‘Why aren’t people getting it?’” she said. “What [my team is] constantly trying to do is break it down, think about who we’re trying to reach, what the hesitation is and how we can reach them. We’re constantly, of course, trying to support our physicians and front lines and communities in understanding where those pockets of reticence are and focusing in.”

Supriya Mannapalli, M.D., medical director for infectious diseases at Northeast Georgia Health System, said that consistent, repeated reminders are needed to hammer home to the public the ongoing struggles of healthcare providers.

“Yes, [our pleas] are being heard, but we have to continue to reinforce them. That’s the most important thing,” she said during last week’s joint press conference. “After two years of being in this pandemic, everyone is just tired of hearing the word COVID. But we’re still here in the middle of our fifth wave and we just have to continue to reinforce.”

Making the most of pandemic messaging opportunities

Beyond presenting a unified front, health systems can get the most bang for their buck by giving the microphone to their doctors and nurses as well as patients.  

“What has bolstered these efforts even more—beyond the clear data around vaccine effectiveness and the overwhelming numbers we share about unvaccinated being the ones needing our care the most—are the honest, genuine, heartfelt stories about individual patients and experiences that our experts share in interviews and press conferences,” Hamby said. “It bolsters the facts and data with humanity.”

“Several of our patient families have shared their stories about why they got their kids vaccinated to be an example for other families,” Gorelick said. “Some of these stories included children with underlying health conditions—they wanted to prove that if the vaccine is safe for their child, it’s safe for almost all other kids. The story of one of our nurses in the pediatric ICU asking the community for letters and other gifts to boost the morale led to an overwhelming amount of donations.”

Incorporating feedback from the other side of the aisle can also ensure that health messaging—both broad and targeted—will find its audience, Nicolas said.

“The messaging in [our most recent] press conference was based on the questions that we were getting,” she said, “so we were listening to the voices of the public and the communities and then telling the stories—not just what we wanted to tell but what audiences told us that they needed to hear.”

Partnerships and open lines of communication with the media have also proven vital to pandemic-era messaging, the health systems said.

Hamby said his organization’s physicians have been among those educating the public “multiple times a week” on local television over the past couple of years. Similarly, Nicolas with Wellstar Health System said her organization is “constantly watching” the regional and international news as well as public health department releases for any pandemic-related updates on which its experts can weigh in.

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“If there’s a spike or a new treatment coming out or questions around some particular symptom or pediatric cases are going up, that’s a storytelling opportunity, and we want to make sure we work with our media partners to educate and inform new audiences,” she said.

When it does come time for health systems to issue a public statement or organize a press conference, Nicolas said organizations should be strategic about selecting a third party that can both moderate the event and boost its reach.

“We really felt that we needed to have someone help moderate that was going to be apolitical so that we could really reach both sides of the aisle,” she said. “[We wanted] somebody who was media agnostic, meaning that it wasn’t one particular media outlet that would potentially impact the potential for coverage in other media outlets, and somebody who had credibility with the audience we were trying to reach … and potentially had a large audience following of their own.”

“[We chose] Katie Kirkpatrick, who is the president and CEO of the Metro Atlanta Chamber [of Commerce],” Nicolas continued. “That’s another best practice: Find somebody who can collaborate with you, who has a following and will help further the credibility of the event and messages—and also who you can have cross-leverage with their audience. Their audience, obviously, is businesses across most of Atlanta, so we got to reach the employers and the employees of some of the largest companies in the nation.”