Educational role of medical scientific societies for patients

 

| Por Pilar Araya, Founding Partner B12 Communications

The common mission of all medical scientific societies is to contribute to the advancement of a specific medical specialty. To fulfill this mission, they conduct continuing education activities for physicians (congresses, courses, scientific meetings, etc.), publish their own materials (scientific journals, bulletins, etc.), advise organizations such as the Ministry of Health, and ensure the quality of training and professional development within their respective specialties.

In keeping with this mission, the communication strategy of a medical scientific society has always been focused “directly” on the physician and not on the patient or the general population. This is despite the fact that the efforts made within these organizations will have a positive impact on the patient. However, technology and the greater access to information that any individual has today have highlighted the importance of these medical groups in playing a leading role in patient education. The digital world has forever changed the doctor-patient relationship. Physicians have gone from having passive patients to “pacientes google”. Por lo tanto, ya no basta con promover el progreso de una especialidad solo desde el cuerpo médico, también una sociedad científica debe fijarse como misión educar a la población y con ello ayudar a prevenir enfermedades, promover estilos de vida saludable o, incluso, tolerar mejor algunas enfermedades o dolencias.

Scientific societies are probably the best equipped to carry out this task. They bring together the top specialists in a country from different universities, hospitals, and clinics, and have an extensive network of contacts with various international organizations and universities.

However, launching a patient education strategy requires time, resources, effort, and discipline. Below are the basic steps for a scientific society to begin a patient education project:

1. Define the target: Who will receive the education? Pediatricians will tell parents, teachers, and caregivers, while gynecologists will tell women, urologists will tell men, and geriatricians will tell older adults and caregivers. Each scientific society knows better than anyone else who the patients are or who can make the decision regarding that target group.

2. Communication channels: Today it makes sense to have a website that houses all the valuable educational content in different formats (blog, podcast, videos, etc.). But then, it's necessary to define the communication channels through which this content will be distributed. There are two types of channels: online and offline.

2.1. Online channels: It is all communication that takes place on the internet. Some examples:

- Social networks

–          Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

–          Social Media Optimization (SMO)

– Electronic newsletter

2.2 Offline channels: This is communication that takes place through traditional channels, outside of the internet, and in some cases relies on physical space to disseminate the message. Some examples:

- Television

–          Radio

– Printed newspapers

– Printed material (brochures, newsletters)

3. Medical Editor: Each scientific society should appoint a medical editor for patient communications. Their role will be to act as a liaison between the society's physicians and the communication experts who will create the content. They will also be responsible for identifying topics where the scientific society believes more patient education is needed and for communicating to the society those topics of greatest interest to its members.

4. Journalistic team: La comunicación a pacientes debe ser en un lenguaje simple pero, al mismo tiempo, confiable, completo e informativo. Por eso es fundamental contar con periodistas con experiencia en salud a la hora de generar los contenidos.

5. Costs: Evaluate the monthly and annual costs of the educational strategy and make funding decisions based on this. As a scientific society, it is a non-profit organization, therefore its resources are very limited, hence the need for an advertising strategy to finance the project. This advertising strategy, as with any media outlet, must not interfere with the editorial line of the content. Furthermore, any companies involved in this type of educational project should be aligned with the promotion of a healthy lifestyle. 

6. Measure and evaluate: Today, online communication allows us to effectively measure the impact of a communication strategy. Without measurement, there's no evaluation, and without evaluation, there's no improvement or enhancement of what's already working well.