Engaging healthcare professionals through innovative and low-cost strategies

Background:

Healthcare professionals are often a critical audience to reach through health communication efforts, including the Hear Her™ campaign. This portion of the panel will discuss best practices in conducting formative work with this audience, the importance of nuances in messaging to different types of providers, and strategies for implementation with limited resources.

Data from Maternal Mortality Review Committees show that clinical factors play a role in many pregnancy-related deaths. Factors include missed or delayed diagnoses or inappropriate or delayed treatment by healthcare providers, and facilities lacking experience with obstetric emergencies and protocols for response. Therefore, healthcare professionals are an important audience to reach in efforts to reduce maternal mortality. Providing an accurate and timely diagnosis, appropriate treatment, and quality care during pregnancy and in the postpartum period can save lives.

Program background:

Literature and anecdotal evidence suggest there is often a communication gap between pregnant and postpartum women and their healthcare providers, with many women expressing they feel dismissed when bringing up health concerns. The Hear Her™ campaign, launched in August 2020, seeks to improve communication between pregnant and postpartum people and their healthcare providers. As part of these efforts, there was a need to communicate messages directly to healthcare professionals who serve or interact with pregnant and postpartum people.

Evaluation Methods and Results:

The learnings from formative work informed creative concepts and materials development. The Hear Her™ campaign team solicited feedback from partners, conducted a CDC literature review, and conducted informational interviews. The team developed overall messages for healthcare professionals while also recognizing important nuances when messaging to different types of healthcare providers.

Conclusions:

Based on findings from formative work, the team segmented the healthcare professional audience and developed messages and materials for each segment.

A new English and Spanish webpage and suite of materials for healthcare professionals as it relates to the Hear Her™ campaign was launched in January 2022. Promotion included strategic partner outreach, earned and paid media efforts, and social media engagement. Established relationships with organizations like Doximity, Epocrates, Medscape, and RNsights proved to be effective channels of dissemination.

Implications for research and/or practice:

Health communication campaigns sometimes have minimal resources to develop and disseminate campaign messages and materials to specific audience segments. The Hear Her™ campaign team was able to successfully tailor important health messages and share them widely through creative, innovative, and low-cost methods. There is ongoing work to continue learning about our healthcare professional audiences and how best to motivate behavior change as the campaign evolves.