November 2020- Full communications project
Patient Shielding Policy change
Who: OHSU Diagnostic Radiology Department (fluoroscopy, X-Ray, and CT)
What: Full communications plan including a webpage as source-of-truth for all communications, a brochure with a QR code to direct people back to the webpage, news post for university-wide communication, social media promotion, and helped to identify and coordinate efforts to present at university level meetings.
Result: I created a communication plan to communicate this significant and potentially highly anxiety-inducing policy change to clinic staff, patients, and parents of patients.
The project started with a new nationally recognized standard of care.
In April 2019, The American Association of Physicists in Medicine Communicating Advances in Radiation Education for Shielding (AAPM CARES) announced their position that the use of patient shielding should be discontinued. In January 2020, OHA issued an informational bulletin about the same thing. Our department physicists decided we needed to implement this change across OHSU and needed to educate the OHSU community. There was considerable concern for patients not understanding and fearing the change.
Our planning process
Our department physicists, a few Radiology managers, and I started discussing a campaign to educate the OHSU and patient community about this change. We created a website to direct people to general information about the change and included FAQs. I was given five Word documents of FAQs that were primarily repeated. I created the website text from those documents, which was repeated in the patient flyer available for clinics to download and print.
Paper posters can still be a useful communication tool for connecting your audience to your website.
I created a printable letter-size poster with a QR code that linked back to our website.
To effectively communicate an important topic to so many different people, it was necessary to use as many channels as possible. Clinics were able to print this poster and post it in their area.
Personal challenges and incorporating best practice
The text I received was very repetitive and needed to be better organized so people could quickly access and understand the information. I didn’t want the website to be more text-heavy than it needed to be. I organized the text into general why and history and then added information about the new industry standard. I chose a picture that perfectly summed up what we anticipated our largest audience’s concern- children getting x-ray/ exposure to radiation. In our discussions, we were most concerned with the reactions of parents. The picture is an ‘action’ photo and is intended to give you a feeling of calmness and caring of a peds patient.
I used a callout box to break up the text further and highlight the important transition date. We included FAQs at the bottom to help the OHSU community with talking points to help communicate this change to patients.
