ABOUT PALIN

Palin Communications is where evidence-based social marketing principles meet best practice health-focused PR to change environments, enlighten audiences, build categories and change small parts of the healthcare world.

If you are thinking about briefing a PR agency, then you clearly want to shake things up. You want to facilitate change. 

Sometimes change means increasing, awareness about a particular disease or helping change the way it is managed by specific healthcare professionals. It can mean improved relations between a manufacturer and the people who recommend its products. Or political changes in the way medical technology, new treatment options and health-related devices are perceived by governments.

The integration of PR with online activities and other social marketing tactics - plus the way it amplifies the input and support of independent third parties - renders it uniquely capable of driving big health and medical campaigns. These campaigns can underpin major changes in community attitudes, public policy, treatment preferences, health-related behaviour and medical practice. These are the kinds of changes that can completely alter the environment in which you operate. And they are driven by the types of campaigns at which the Palin Communications team excels.

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 The 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.

Healthcare PR can be applied to a range of different challenges. Palin Communications has experience in all of the following settings:

• Launching new pharmaceutical products
• Switching products from prescription only to over-the-counter availability
• Developing and launching a new social media campaign to raise awareness about a particular disease
• Managing a health-related crisis - like a product recall, an extortion attempt or an aggressive attack by a tabloid media outlet
• Announcing a new subsidy or government support for a health service or product
• Handling media relations to help promote a medical conference
• Coordinating a PR strategy that helps contribute to a fundraising campaign
• Raising the corporate profile of a health-related organisation
• Improving relations with peak medical and healthcare groups
• Managing medical specialists and opinion leaders