The Minder

One of the most satisfying applications of corporate brand strategy is in helping hospitals define their proposition and orient themselves to a promise that sets them apart from others in their networks. This is far more than renaming, re-skinning or capital campaign sloganeering. In Canada anyway, it’s a survival tactic. If you cannot demonstrate to your funders, your patients, your staff and your donors why you matter and the piece of the system only you can own, someone else is going to come along and claim your space.

In the U.S. the work in this area is very much around competing for patient loyalty, which in their funding structure is entirely appropriate. A recent McKinsey report argues well for the need to define your value proposition to patients and create experiences that back up the promise. But it does not go far enough for Canadian hospitals.

In Canada the need is different. With our publicly funded system, the competition for capital, operating and research dollars is intense. Plus, the move to regional health networks creates strong imperatives to rationalize duplication of services within regions which in turn puts new pressure on hospital boards to make tough choices about where they will lead, and where they will follow. The competition for donor giving is doubly-intense as hospitals compete with the increasing sophistication of institutions in the arts, academics, environment and global aid.

It’s always scary for hospital boards to make choices with the risk of alienating a key constituency. Also, they tend to have strong care-giving cultures and by nature do not feel comfortable with the idea that they would not try to be the best at everything for the patient’s sake. So, the traditional approach to self-description tends to fall back on clinical scope and capacity, such as:

3 acute-care teaching organizations

Community based health care facility and teaching hospital

A multi-site regional teaching hospital

A 400-bed community hospital

Fine, thank you, but why would I go there instead of the alternative; why would I fund your cardiac centre or new PET scanners, why would I give you $50 million and get my name in your lobby? What is the thing only you can do? Through good strategic planning, and pressure from government to make choices, most of the teaching hospitals, and many more local care facilities are actively choosing where to claim leadership. But that is still a long way from truly defining brand – the promise that you make and the value that you deliver.

Some of Canada’s hospitals have started down this road, but it is early days. St. Michael’s Hospital in Toronto was the first to really claim a brandspace after emerging from a planning process that gave it a focus on, among other things, the health of the city’s homeless: Toronto’s Urban Angel. An idea that mattered. A role that no one else would ever claim, and a very natural product of its origins as a Catholic teaching hospital founded by the Sisters of St. Joseph. Unfortunately this lovely idea has given way to the incredibly mundane “Leading with Innovation. Serving with Compassion”, but the urban angel is still at the heart of who they are.

North York General is building on a very different idea, but one also connected to place – promising to be an integral member of the community for patients across generations and through all stages of life. This promise is not just a “we’ll be there for you” slogan. It is having a profound influence on the clinical and academic choices that the board and staff are making. It has the potential to result in a community-based teaching hospital that is made relevant to the local community not just through service delivery, but by being at the forefront of clinical issues that really matter to North York’s population, like neo-natal, oncology, geriatrics and community-based care. A nice new idea about the role of the community teaching hospital.

Branding hospitals is a new and scary idea for many, partly because branding is associated with commercial notions very foreign to Canadian healthcare. But it has to happen. It can be incredibly liberating and clarifying to internal and external constituencies. It can galvanize thousands of staff, volunteers, patients, donors and funders around a higher sense of the purpose of what they do. It has to happen, and it will.