Editor’s Note: How Healthcare Survived & Lessons to Guide Us
It’s been a year. And what a ride it’s been.
The milestone itself is artificial, something that we assign arbitrary value to. But there’s also some substance behind the calendar turning over to March 2021. Vaccine distribution is smoothing out, and while the number of new cases remains high, it’s dropped dramatically. And hospitalizations are down. For now, at least. There’s always the risk new variants and relaxed restrictions could create a fourth surge.
What’s significant about now is that, perhaps for the first time, there’s a visible path out of this.
It’s also a good time to start sifting through the past year and identifying some of the communications lessons we learned. After all, we’re still close enough to the crisis that it’s fresh. But we’re far enough away from the first rumblings of a new, deadly virus that we have some room to reflect and process and learn. Perspective, you call it.
In this final installment of Art of Change, Season 2, we’re giving you actionable perspective.
In this volume, we’ve divided the first year of the pandemic into phases – six of them, to be exact – based on the events and themes from initial shutdown through today’s bumpy vaccination period.
For each phase, one of our veteran advisors explores what was happening with their clients – be they academic medical centers, rural hospitals, regional health systems, PE-backed health services companies – and unveils critical communications lessons to be learned from them. Lessons are drawn from the writers’ deep experiences with strategic communications in general and helping an array of clients all shapes and sizes across the nation through the COVID-19 crisis specifically. You’ll see some overlap in their takeaways, and we think that’s good because it reveals the fundamental principles that drive the art of change. If it came up repeatedly, it’s probably something that we should remember in, uh, the next precedented time.
As always, thanks for reading. Tell us what you think – send a note to [email protected]
More importantly, thanks for your mission, your commitment and the work you continue to do to care for your teams, your organizations and your communities.
