Creating a future with
more clinical empathy

I have spent the majority of my career working with consumer brands – where all campaigns are designed to create an emotional connection that makes people want to choose your product and brand over others. It’s about showing that you understand your target audience and then communicating with them in a way that makes them feel that you ‘get’ them and their needs. It’s quite straightforward, really.

But when I moved into healthcare comms, I noticed a difference. Sure, any comms designed to engage patient communities follow a similar approach to consumer brand comms, while of course being mindful of the regulatory guidelines. But when it comes to engaging with healthcare professionals (HCPs), these interactions can sometimes feel individual, disconnected and episodic. They lack the continuity needed for real-world impact and often overlook the value that sustained and purposefully designed efforts can offer. And it can result in fragmented insights that make it challenging to shape a clear strategy, leading to lost opportunities to make a tangible impact on patient communities.

At its heart, it comes back to being able to convey empathy – ‘the ability to understand and imagine the feelings, experiences and perspective of another person’. And it doesn’t matter if you’re a person living with a serious disease or a highly experienced professor of medicine. At the end of the day, we are all human and want to be treated as such, regardless of our chosen profession. Empathy is how anyone builds a meaningful relationship and nobody knows this better than HCPs – because they do this every day, whenever they speak to and care for their patients.

So, how can we as comms professionals put empathy at the heart of how we communicate with HCPs? Here are three simple steps we can all take to create more meaningful campaigns:

1. Obsess about uncovering insights
Be serious about properly understanding the professional needs, challenges and motivations of HCPs within their specific clinical environments, and how these relate to other specialities involved in each individual’s care journey. Create surveys, pick up the phone, have more conversations – if you don’t find out what really matters, nothing will change.

2. Use language that cuts through the jargon
Create more effective, people-centric conversations by connecting lived community experiences with clinical terminology to deliver a common language that is understood by all. Don’t hide behind the jargon just because you’re used to it – if there is a simpler way to express something, change it.

3. Foster a community spirit
Create an ongoing conversation that meets the clinical and professional needs of HCPs while also driving collaboration and knowledge sharing. Make it easy for HCPs to meet like-minded clinicians and make more friends – this will benefit everyone.

Here at 67health, we recently organised a two-day, global summit for the inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) community, attended by primary and secondary HCPs, community representatives, caregivers and policy experts, all sharing their experiences and perspectives centred around how to improve overall well-being, including communication as a potential barrier to effective care.

The summit workshops revealed that there is a misalignment in communication between the patient community and its doctors, often driven by a mismatch in priorities. If we let time limitations get in the way of digging deeper into the life circumstances and emotional truths that affect an individual, it becomes very challenging to offer the right support.

And it’s not just the patient community that has to grapple with emotions. We heard from clinicians about how much their work affects them outside their working day. Some described coming home to their loved ones after a long day and bursting into tears, due to pent-up emotions after hearing their patients talking about their conditions. Others opened up about how a patient’s story replayed in their minds for days and weeks on end. It confirmed the importance of taking a human-first approach to engaging with any audience.

We need to find more ways of making the experience of health conditions better for more people. If you’re interested in finding out how Clinical Empathy™ can help you with your comms, please drop us a line at hello@67health.co.uk.