Online individual consultation about PR with Bohdana Rambousková 2020

The majority of my consultations took place online due to the COVID-19 pandemic, which has confirmed that this form works and fully replaces personal meetings.

The patient organizations’ communication needs included the following three basic areas:

-        The patient organizations looked for support in handling specific communication problems;

-        The patient organizations needed assistance in setting up a communication plan for a specific planned activity;

-        The patient organizations faced problems that stemmed from an insufficient internal communication.

The activity of patient organizations was very much affected by the COVID-19 pandemic, and this is why we often talked about the appropriate response to the current situation. The patient organizations mostly had problems with an effective dissemination of information about COVID-19 among its members and people with a certain health problem and also had to decide what to do about their planned events. Together, we made plans how to switch their planned activity to an online environment or to combine an online and personal meeting, while observing safety measures, in order to preserve the community experience. The need for an effective internal communication came up repeatedly during our consultations and proved to be an important topic for developing patient organizations.

I really enjoyed consulting with the patient organizations. Our meetings showed that that it would be good to mainly put resources into advertising on social networks, identifying topics and looking for opportunities for their communication and working with fundraising tools in terms of their dissemination and promotion. I would like to thank for the opportunity to work with people from patient organizations and I wish them a lot of success in their further activities.