Fish on the Beach

I was in London this week—the reasons perhaps I will get into in a future post.

One aspect of British health care public relations that I find interesting is how British PR managers have included medical education in their overall offering. In fact, many UK health care practices make more quid on med ed than on traditional health communications.

Fifteen or twenty years ago, public relations firms on this side of the Atlantic had the opportunity to acquire the largely independent, modest-sized organizations that strategized physician messaging and developed and conducted symposia for physicians and medical congresses and supply continuing education programs as supplements in medical journals.

PR fumbled however and most companies never seriously got into the medical education business. Perhaps agencies were too busy counting the bucks showered on them after they were acquired by the large advertising holding companies. Medical education businesses instead were purchased by medical advertising agencies (that in turn were gobbled up by the holding companies).

Flash forward. Medical advertising agencies are now required to either spin off their med education operations or erect mile-high walls separating them from the more commercial side of the business. Fair enough. It really is in everyone’s best interests to keep physician education—which is supposed to be dispassionate and objective—from advertising which is, well, less objective. Many activists, including prominent doctors, are calling for even higher barriers, effectively precluding pharmaceutical companies from sponsoring any medical education activities; which would leave the medical education firms flopping around like beached fish. Not a good scenario for many reasons.

Here’s why this might be important to public relations: one of the most important product communications strategies is to create educational campaigns to help “raise awareness of xyz-itis as a serious medical condition” and to encourage patients to ask their health care professional if they may be at risk for heartbreak of xyz-itis.

Will there be a point at which the critics of commercial medical education might rear-up and say, whoa, commercial public relations firms should not be undertaking public education campaigns, because the firms may be surreptitiously injecting brand messages into campaigns?

Years ago when I was consulting with Searle for an investigational anti-platelet drug we were proscribed from working with the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute because Searle wanted to separate the commercial PR (that’s me!) from health education. Was the late, great head of its time?

While there haven’t been many examples since of companies segregating public education from marketing PR, they might do so in the future. As with medical education, will public relationship firms be forced to cleave off public education into separate stand-alone divisions? That would not harm large firms, but be confounding for smaller public relations agencies.

So far, no one is demanding this separation of church and state, but don’t bet the farm that things will always stay the same.

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