Page 14 - 2012-may-jun

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14
Healthcare Journal of BATON ROUGE  
MAY / JUN 2012
CR I S I S MANAGEMENT
Still, says Fred Garcia, “even in the old days
people didn’t have as much time as they
thought they did.” Garcia is the president of the
crisis management firm, Logos, based in New
York. He has worked with clients in dozens of
countries on six continents and is the author of
“The Power of Communication” which will be
released by FT Press inMay. Despite new tech-
nology, which represents both new opportuni-
ties and new challenges when communicating
during crisis situations, Garcia stresses that
the basic principles of effective communica-
tion remain the same. Others agree.
Things That Remain the Same
For one thing, notes Paul Kirk, VP of infor-
mation services for Woman’s Hospital, new
technology can’t always be relied upon to be
accessible or functional in the types of crises
that areas like Baton Rouge typically face.
“Certain crisis situations that we experience
here in the south—like hurricanes, floods or
tornadoes—can really take out a lot of your
infrastructure.” During Katrina, he says, ham
radio became a key communication tool. “We
fell all the way back to old school,” he says. Cell
towers were overwhelmed or out of power with
many offline. “You can have all of the new tech-
nologies, but in certain crisis situations, that
technology is not going to work,” he notes.
‘‘The single biggest
predictor of reputational
harm is the perception
that
the entity in
question doesn’t care.”
Hospital inpatients are evacuated
prior to the landfall of a hurricane.