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Health-care PR rich in opportunities

Christina Marshall and Wendy Johnson are public relations practitioners who work in health care. But how they reached their respective positions differs enormously and shows how a highly specialized field such as theirs can still be flexible.

DAVID CHILTON

[ 2006-04-19 ]

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MARSHALL
Vivant Communications

NURSING

Marshall, the daughter of McMaster University researchers, graduated from Queen's University in Kingston, Ont., in 1986 with a degree in nursing, and worked in hemodialysis (blood cleaning for people with kidney failure) for three years in Hamilton.

She got the sense that nursing wasn't the right fit for her and hankered after a more educative role in health care.

" I like to start the day as a blank slate," Marshall says, explaining her dislike of routine.

Then she saw an ad for someone to do the public relations for the Organ Transplant Society of Ontario, landed the job and started to volunteer for health-related groups. "I just kept volunteering for different programs," Marshall says. Now she runs her own company in Toronto called Vivant Communications.

Wendy Johnson, director of community relations and communications for Credit Valley Hospital in Mississauga, took the classic route into public relations. She graduated from high school and attended Mohawk College in Hamilton and began working as a producer at CHML-AM in that city. She then moved on to become a news and traffic reporter at the station before her first excursion into PR at the Hamilton Harbour Commission.

But she decided at that point public relations wasn't for her, so it was back to reporting as she and her husband worked at the CBC in Victoria, Winnipeg and Halifax. In Halifax, Johnson found her self doing on-air health features, then saw an advertisement for a PR vacancy in Fredericton. This time she was ready and spent seven years in the New Brunswick capital before joining Credit Valley.

Johnson warns that health- care public relations is significantly different from general PR. "You need to be very creative in health-care public relations," she says. "Everything is geared towards the patients. There's very little money for the soft areas."

Both Johnson and Marshall say a health care background for would-be practitioners is a definite asset.

"With a medical background you can establish a rapport right away (with doctors and others)," Marshall says. And while that medical language works with those in the trade, she cautions that it doesn't help with those who aren't trained in some branch of medicine. It has to be translated into lay language, something the public and reporters on deadline will understand, Marshall says.

The two women also agree that formal education in public relations is another asset. Johnson regularly talks to Humber College PR students about working in health care, an area she calls "so rich in opportunities."

One of the students Johnson has spoken to is Janice Park, who enrolled in the one-year post grad program at Humber after graduating from U of T with a management degree last year.

Park, who's from Korea, says interest in the field was sparked by her father's eye surgery. The operation he required wasn't available at home so he went to Japan to have it done, which started her thinking about health-care communications and her own career.

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