Hospital PR teams manage Colorado shootings with care

The mass shootings in Aurora, Colorado, are a terrible tragedy not only for those who were hurt and killed but for their family members and loved ones. As a health care PR practitioner watching this horrific event unfold, I paid special attention to how the media covered it and even more attention to how the hospital caring for the victims handled the media.

The need to protect patient privacy while also meeting the needs of the media is not an easy task. The world wants to know how the victims are doing, and it is the media’s job to inform them. But as a public information officer working in health care, it’s our responsibility to protect the patients.

Patient information is protected by the HIPAA Privacy Rule. HIPAA stands for Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act and is designed to give patients an array of rights with respect to their personal health information. Bottom line, the only people who should be accessing your health information are the doctors, nurses and other health care professionals providing you medical care.

In a situation like the Aurora shootings, where there is an influx of patients being brought to the hospital as a result of a single event, the privacy rule prevents individually identifiable health information from being disclosed. It does, however, allow for some leeway so that important health care communications can occur. For example, in a situation like this, the hospital’s public information officer can share limited information with media, such as the number of people being treated, how many are in a particular condition and the types of injuries that are being treated. Information is very generic and cannot be specific to any one patient. If media want to speak with a specific patient or their family members, they can make this request via the public information officer, and only when written consent is given, can that interview occur. However, it is often difficult for the public information officer to provide media with access to patients, namely because an interruption of this kind could compromise care and/or the patient is not ready or is physically unable to speak about what has happened. When this happens, media often want to speak to the health care professionals treating the patients. The public information officer then has to find a medically qualified spokesperson that can be readily available for interviews and can also speak in terms that the general public can understand.

Choosing the right medical spokesperson and making him or her available for interviews is where I think the Colorado hospitals excelled. These physicians were knowledgeable and empathetic, and they spoke in terms that we could all understand. I was especially impressed with the Denver Medical Center physician who spoke about his experience treating victims of the Columbine shooting and what it felt like to go through this a second time. In the absence of patients, these are the types of stories media latch on to, and they are good ones.

I give kudos to the PR teams at these hospitals. From what I could tell, they worked within the constraints of HIPAA while also meeting the needs of the media. Having experienced a few minor events myself, though certainly nothing of this magnitude, I know how time consuming this balancing act can be. These PR teams probably haven’t slept in over a week and likely won’t return to their regular routines until every victim has left the hospital. It’s a demanding job, no doubt, but these PR teams are doing it well.

Author: Karen Potter, Greenville Hospital System