Helping Frontline Clinicians Through the Pandemic
Silver Anvil
Content Marketing > Nonprofit Organizations
Submitted By: Center to Advance Palliative Care (CAPC) with LDM Strategies
© 2021, Public Relations Society of America, Inc.
Title: Helping Frontline Clinicians through the Pandemic
Submission Category: Content Marketing
Submitted by: Center to Advance Palliative Care and LDM Strategies
Situation
On March 13, 2020, the U.S. shut down due to
the deadly COVID-19 (“Covid”) pandemic.
People’s greatest fear was dying or becoming
overwhelmed by enormous physical
suffering. Was the health care system ready
to respond, quickly and effectively, when
patients needed relief of symptoms like
severe, uncontrolled shortness of breath?
Were clinicians caring for Covid-positive
patients ready to communicate with family
(and other caregivers), when they could not
visit their loved ones in the hospital? Despite
the importance of these conversations, many
physicians did not feel prepared to take on
discussions of this type, as they were never
trained to do so.
The principles and practices of palliative
care—relief of complex symptoms due to
serious illness, communication with family
and all other clinicians, support for priority
setting—were the same skills needed to
navigate the influx of patients who were sick
due to the virus. However, palliative care
teams were a scarce resource. While they
themselves needed strategic support
to make rapid decisions on the wards, it was
necessary to scale this knowledge and skill to
all clinicians treating people with Covid. To
address this need, the Center to Advance
Palliative Care (CAPC) provided essential
online tools and support for clinicians from
all disciplines and all specialties, free of
charge, throughout the pandemic.
Insights and Analysis
In addition to hearing directly from
clinicians on the front lines, we relied on
data, which showed critical gaps in care.
CAPC’s most recent Report Card data show
that palliative care teams are not available in
every U.S.
hospital—while 94% of U.S. hospitals with more
than 300 beds have a team, only 62% of hospitals
with 50 to 299 beds have a team. Additionally,
just 29% of physicians report having any formal
training in communication about goals of care,
and 46% report they are unsure about what to
say in these conversations. With communication
between clinicians, patients, and families being
a major issue during Covid, there was a clear
need and demand for complex communication
and symptom management skills—the domain
of palliative care. This was reinforced by
clinicians reaching out to CAPC, asking for help.
Additionally, numerous articles were highlighting
clinician burnout and distress due to struggles
with family communication.
Planning
We were faced with the challenge of reaching
and engaging clinicians working on the front
lines, who had no time to breathe let alone train.
Getting CAPC’s tools and technical assistance
into the hands of as many clinicians as possible,
in an immediate, accessible, and useful
way, required a mix of integrated strategies,
including: (1) Ensuring that hospital stakeholders
nationwide knew about the CAPC COVID-19
Rapid Response Resources Hub (“Hub”) and
how to access it online, within 48 hours of the
U.S. lockdown; (2) Publicizing and promoting
the Hub through briefings by leading experts,
media relations, social media, highly-targeted
email communications, SEO/SEM, digital
advertising, and original editorial content from
health care leaders and clinicians on the front
lines; (3) Developing the original Hub content
into a branded mobile-optimized microsite
that functioned like an app in the pockets of all
clinicians on Covid wards (e.g., ED, ICU); and (4)
Increasing awareness of the value of palliative
care within the hospital.
Copyright 2021, Public Relations Society of America, Inc.
Execution
With a focus on timing and a steady
drumbeat of cross-channel communication,
program tactics were centered on:
term “COVID-19” in the advertising, due to new
advertising rules set by Google.
Evaluation
With the goal of supporting palliative care teams
Microsite: At the start of the surge we quickly with just-in-time resources, geared to Covid,
while also scaling knowledge and skill to other
developed, designed, and built an app-like
clinicians not normally trained in this area, we
microsite (the “Hub”), where all Covidbecame a go-to resource for hospitals and health
related content was moved for a better user
experience: capc.org/covid-19. The microsite, systems across the country. From March through
December 2020, the Hub microsite and its
which had over 150+ resources, helped
accompanying elements achieved:
clinicians on the front lines immediately
access just-in-time tools at the bedside, no
matter their device. The Hub could be easily
Objective: To drive and increase awareness and
updated as additional needs were captured
adoption of the Hub among clinicians on the front
(via word of mouth, online form, and articles
lines through content marketing, social media
in the press), and resources were built or
multi-channel marketing, and media relations.
identified.
National Briefings: We organized, scheduled,
and held a national briefing to announce the
launch of the Hub on March 16, 2020. This
was followed by a second briefing, which was
hosted in partnership with the American
Hospital Association (AHA). Having AHA as a
partner expanded our reach to an additional
audience of hospital-based clinicians, eager
to access the free resources.
Stakeholder engagement: Using a multichannel approach, including highlytargeted emails to over 90,000 clinicians,
we successfully engaged a target audience
that was exhausted and stressed. Our social
media strategy (Twitter, LinkedIn, and
Facebook) was re-prioritized to drive traffic to
the Hub and related virtual events. And the
blog strategy was reimagined with original
essential content, including health equity,
burnout, and emotional PPE. Additionally, we
created and promoted Virtual Office Hours so
that all clinicians could ask experts and peers
their urgent questions.
Digital marketing: To encourage more
clinicians to visit the Hub, we advertised via
Google Ads; though effective, there was the
added challenge of not being able to use the
Results: Social media proved to be a critical tactic
with high engagement. On Twitter, we had 3,100+
tweets, reaching 17,000+ clinicians and health
care leaders, and garnering an engagement rate of
25,800+; on LinkedIn there was a 44% increase in
clicks; and on Facebook, there was a 51% increase
in engagement. The 9 Covid-specific blog posts
garnered 30,000+ page views, a 74% increase
in readership from 2019. And our media efforts
resulted in 276 placements, reaching an audience
of over 187 million. Press coverage included CAPC
Director, Dr. Diane Meier’s Brief But Spectacular
video for PBS NewsHour, articles in The Wall
Street Journal and USA Today, and more.
As of December 2020, the Hub received over
215,000 page views and 150,000 resource
downloads, with an average time on site being
about 6 minutes. Google ads achieved a 4.05%
click thru rate.
As of December 2020, 175,000+ Hub clinical
training courses have been completed, a record
for CAPC. Page views increased 20% between
June and December 2020. There has been a 150%
increase in attendance for the Hub-related Virtual
Office Hours, and the two national briefings
resulted in 2,000 registrations and an additional
14,000 on-demand views.
Copyright 2021, Public Relations Society of America, Inc.