Healthcare PR is about targeted communications with specific audiences on health-related issues to achieve agreed outcomes.

Some people think it is just "PR that targets doctors and pharmacists" which is not true. Of course healthcare professionals are important target audiences in many projects, but the element that defines healthcare PR is not the target audience - rather it is the subject matter.

And the subject matter is always health-related.

So whether it is talking to the readers of Women's Weekly about natural approaches to menopause, or talking to ophthalmologists in professional newsletters about new approaches to eye surgery - it's all healthcare PR.

The following tasks would all be typical healthcare PR tasks, too:

• Launching new pharmaceutical products
• Switching products from prescription only to OTC availability
• Managing a health-related crisis - a product recall, an extortion attempt or an aggressive attack by a tabloid media outlet
• Promotion and media relations for a medical conference
• Raising the corporate profile of a health-related organisation
• Improving relations with peak medical and healthcare groups
• Managing medical specialists and opinion leaders

Some examples of this kind of work can be found in our Case Studies section