This week on Ethical Voices, Linda Staley, APR, Fellow PRSA, corporate communications manager at Carilion Clinic, discusses several topics, including:
- Why trust is the real currency in healthcare communications
- How transparency in a crisis can protect your reputation more than perfection
- How the ethical risks of AI and misinformation will shape our future calling
Tell me more about yourself and your career.
I’ve been a public relations practitioner all my life. I wasn’t born one of course, but came to the field quickly, when it became evident that my career in theater and performing arts was probably not going to support the lifestyle that I wanted.
A wise person suggested that I turn my talents to public relations. It’s all about storytelling. I enjoy using words and pictures to communicate a broader narrative that’s meaningful to my clients and my employers. I get a great deal of satisfaction out of a good story well told, and there is no shortage of that here at Carilion Clinic, a large health system in Southwest Virginia.
It’s a roughly $2.5 billion company. We have seven hospitals, about 250 physician practices, and about 15,000 employees all across the region, mostly in Roanoke. I’m a corporate communication manager here, and I have the unique opportunity of telling the breadth of stories and being part of a broader team of great communication professionals in a fairly nascent corporate communications unit to support our executives and our employee communication.
We started a corporate archive, and I also had the great privilege to support our CEO, Nancy Howell Agee, during her term as the American Hospital Association’s Board of Trustees chair.,
I’ve been involved in PRSA my entire adult life, starting as a student at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond in PRSSA. When I became a professional, I joined PRSA and now have the privilege to lead our Board of Ethics and Professional Standards.
What is the most difficult ethical challenge you ever confronted?
I have been very fortunate over the years to work with ethical clients and employers. Healthcare is a highly regulated industry, which is helpful, but there are still a lot of gray areas.
First, Carilion is a pretty valuable and important brand name within the healthcare industry and within our region. Every so often vendors and device manufacturers want to use our name to promote their products. We are happy to comply with that, but we just ask that they give us advance review and approval. I am very careful about this because I believe that it could be misconstrued as endorsements or erode the trust that the public have with us.
So, we’re very careful about how our name is used. We had a PR firm that we shared with a vendor that used our name without our prior review and approval. This is a minor infraction and maybe done more out of inexperience than anything. But it was disingenuous. They were looking to use our name to get media attention for their other client, and we did not have the opportunity to review and approve the material.
It created a lot of confusion with the media and created a lot of work on our part to then go back and correct the record when media misunderstood. I think that really was more inexperience, but it does speak to the importance of professionalism and ethics and understanding the craft and understanding industry practices.
There was another situation that I personally was involved in, and I was so proud of our Chief Medical Officer.
I was editing a physician magazine that came out twice a year. It was a beautiful publication. One of the features was a photo essay in our hybrid operating room. We had surgeons doing these procedures through a vein where they thread a catheter through a vein and put a stent in.
A lot of people know about heart stents, but this was a complex abdominal aortic aneurysm repair. The surgeon was customizing an FDA approved stent device and this was unique.
This is a very elite surgeon and a very complex procedure. So, we wanted to show his prowess at this procedure. We had our photographer in the OR and we were showing the thing that he does that nobody else does…customizing this graft.
We had this beautiful photo spread of him doing just that. It went through review and approval. And one of our leaders then said we probably shouldn’t be customizing things, or we may not want to exactly portray what he’s doing.
So, I asked our chief medical officer “What should we do? We’ve got this photograph and they don’t want us to show this photograph.”
She said I need the surgeon on the phone. I need the chief of surgery on the phone. We need to have a conference call ASAP. They get the surgeon out of the OR. On this particular day, I’m on the call too, and she asks them, point blank, can we be doing this? What should we be doing this?
And after some conversation with all of his bosses involved, it was understood that this was an acceptable customization, and that there are acceptable uses that physicians in their professional practice can determine can be customized for the patient.
It was an interesting situation. A magazine article turned into what I felt was going to be a big issue for us and our leadership called it right away.
We just cannot risk our reputation over misunderstandings or complexities. We want to always do what’s right for the patient.
These examples deal with inaccuracies. One was, somebody, we’ll assume with good intent making some inaccurate statements, and in another case, it was, are we potentially doing a procedure inaccurately?
If a PR pro finds themselves in a situation where they come across information or actions in their organization that are being portrayed inaccurately, what’s the best way to clear the air and make sure you get to the truth?
I felt really empowered as an employee because we tell our employees, if you see something, say something. We have safe watch lines. We encourage people to report things that they see. We believe that if you report near misses, they become learning opportunities. We want more events reported just like the NTSB.
Why is air travel so safe? Because they investigate every accident. They look at the root cause. They are meticulous about identifying the cause of accidents and medicine aspires to be as safe as air travel. It’s similarly complex, but healthcare is a high reliability industry.
People need to feel safe in our care. That they need to be able to trust the entire care team, not just the doctor, but the entire care team. I feel good about working for our organization. I don’t feel I have to have a lot of special training to say, hey, this doesn’t feel right. I feel very supported when I go to our leadership and say, “I don’t know. Does this feel right to you?”
There are books written about how we, for career longevity, need to learn the skills to tell our bosses that things aren’t quite right. Or that we question their behavior or question their ethics. I know there is lots of guidance about that.
I’ve not been in that position and have not yet had to develop that skill. Fortunately, our folks are on the lookout.
Beyond your personal experience, what are you seeing as some of the key ethics challenges for today and tomorrow?
I think it’s the media environment in which we find ourselves today. If social media was bad, AI makes it even worse. I don’t mean bad as a judgment call, but I mean that the communication environment has changed so dramatically in the past couple of decades.
The importance of communication integrity is greater than ever. Ethical PR practitioners have never been in the business of covering up for clients or bosses or trying to communicate that something’s appropriate when it’s not. We do not need to be in that business. The potential for misinformation to spread through social media, through AI, is great.
That to me is the challenge for PR practitioners today. We must impart on the next generation of professionals that we bear responsibility for the information that we produce, whether it’s with AI or distributed through social media. We have a high bar to uphold and we’re responsible for the messages that we produce for our clients and our employers. We also face a lot of challenges for our employers in that we have to play in this ring where there is a lot of misinformation. AI can easily distort; AI can be very deceptive in that it’s easy to use and easy to become reliant on.
You’ve got to remember to use your critical thinking. You have to remember to evaluate and check and double-check the information that you’re getting to ensure that it’s accurate.
Tell me about BEPS.
The Board of Ethics and Professional Standards is a national board of PRSA. We have 11 accredited members, and we produce ethical content like Ethics Standards Advisories, position papers, and other materials to help guide professionals. Ethics month is our Super Bowl. That’s in September. We usually have a webinar. We have case studies on the PRSA website. We recently produced, and you were a part of this, the updated guidance on ethical AI use called Promise and Pitfalls which is available to non-members, no charge on the PRSA website.
BEPS has a unique opportunity right now at this point in time to speak up on communications integrity. That really supports the core value of honesty. We serve a higher calling, which is public service. We play an important role right now as communicators to safeguard public trust in our institutions and trust in communications and our field.
I think that’s really good advice. I think it’s a key charge for everybody as communicators and PR professionals – making sure we’re being accurate, making sure we have integrity in our organizations act with integrity.
Speaking of advice, what’s the best piece of ethics advice you ever received?
If you wouldn’t want to see it on the front page of the newspaper, don’t do it. It’s a pretty good test.
Listen to the full interview, with bonus content here
Note: This interview was edited for clarity. No substantive changes were made.
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