1991 Public relations = practice building

Editor’s note: Public relations is a key way to grow your practice. The advice given in this 1991 article still applies.

Research, including interviews of more than 400 doctors of chiropractic, suggests to us that there is no mystery to public relations. It involves a variety of practices and skills that, for the most part, can be carried out adequately by a doctor possessing average intelligence, common sense, and training.

Because you are reading this article, it is fair to assume that you are at least mildly interested in the subject of public relations. But you may be in for a difficult time unless you are prepared to shed some preconceived notions about PR and see it primarily as the art of communicating truth.

To begin with, public relations can be defined as the art of communicating to your publics — patients, patients’ families, visitors, staff, etc.

Communication is not a self-understood word. One communicates in ways far beyond the written or spoken word. More specifically, communication occurs whenever matter transmitted impinges on a sense and is given to the brain for analysis and interpretation.

For example: If you enter the home of a friend and smell mouth-watering aromas emanating from the kitchen, chances are you will think your friend’s wife is a good cook. Why? Because the odor which impinged upon the sense of smell was analyzed and interpreted by the brain.

If you sit down to dinner, however, and the food is abso-lutely terrible, the sense of taste will lend to the decision that the wife, after all, may not be such a good cook.

In other words, any one of the five senses can be used to receive communicated matter, whether it was communicated intentionally or not, even though the eyes and ears usually are the most commonly used receptors. The analysis that the brain turns out, sometimes in conjunction with the imagination, is termed an image.

The extent of the image depends on the extent of communication. Going back to our previous example, if you never meet the friend’s wife but only taste the disappointing food, your only image of her probably will be that of a bad cook. But since you probably will chat with her, you will be able to develop a more complete image, which includes “bad cook” as a portion.

Unfortunately, with the hectic pace of private practice today, most doctors do not communicate with patients to a degree sufficient to produce a rounded image. As a result, the image generated within a given context often serves as the image of the whole person.

For example: Your employees usually see you in one light only, as the doctor/boss. If they were asked how you are as a family man, they’d probably base their opinion on their image of you as their employer.

Similarly, if prospective patients find you to be very busy and unable to give them the time they feel they deserve, they will probably develop an image of you as “too involved with other affairs to be concerned with patients.” This image of you then will serve as the image they have of the practice, perhaps conceiving it as callous — not really concerned with patients.

In other words, just as one small encounter can serve as the basis for an image of a whole person, so can the image of a person serve as the basis for an image of whomever or whatever that person represents. Of course, the image developed may be entirely false. But this is not the point. The point is that an image will be formed regardless.

And here is where public relations come in.

PROJECTING AN IMAGE

One of the main purposes of public relations is to control projection of an image to as great an extent as possible, so you can control to as great a degree as possible what others think of you and what you represent. In this regard, there are two important considerations:

1. Communicate what the public wants to know. Every person, every practice, is multifaceted. To try to convey all the facts of a personality is impossible.

Therefore, when communicating, it is imperative to know what the public most wants to know about and then communicate it.

For example: Given limited time, a prospective patient wants to know about patient care and related matters. To go into a discussion of other information would be foolhardy.

2. Communicate a truthful image. It is a relatively simple matter to generate a false image. It involves creating programs that promote half-truths or omit critical information.

But is it worth it? When people realize that an image is false, they, to an extent, perceive the person possessing the image as a liar, someone who has raised the level of expectation, thereby making the fall to truth that much more painful.

A number of public-relations programs are available to you. For the most part they cost very little. In many cases they cost nothing.

The programs aren’t designed to make a good image of the chiropractic practice purely for the sake of making a good image. They are, instead, designed to assist in attracting and maintaining practice volume, keeping down employee turnover and, in general, providing tangible, practical benefits whose value far exceeds the investment made.

— Brian Porteous, DC
March-April 1991