The vision for this blog is to create a community of harmonious professionals across the care continuum who encourage each other in exploring digital media as a way to support businesses and families dealing with elder care.
Written on September 20th, 2011 by tasha
I almost titled this blogpost “The rat is always right.” But I was worried that people would not understand the topic. It’s actually a continuation of our series on search engine optimization. The rat comes into it, but you’ll need a context before it will make sense.
My last blogpost was on using personas and stories to generate content most likely to attract new elder care clients via search. The focus was on the “pre-seeker” audience (those Boomer daughters and sons who don’t know your service industry enough to do a search for it).
I gave an example pertinent to geriatric care managers. Certainly hospices can use the same strategy of writing educational articles about circumstances that commonly cause families, or doctors, to refer.
But there is new data I’d like to share concerning optimal language for talking about hospice and palliative care.
This summer, the Center for the Advancement of Palliative Care published their findings from a national public opinion poll. The objectives of the study were
They found that language matters. In the quest to expand horizons so that palliative services offering care concurrent with treatment can get out from under the stigma of comfort-only end-of-life care, they found:
The findings of the study indicate that “serious illness” was by far and away the most accepted terminology.
Going back to our Google search theme:
Serious illness wins again! Now for the rat…
We all know that consumers self-identify as appropriate for hospice much later than the window when they would actually receive the most benefit. Hospice also suffers from the stigma of death and dying. People, understandably, deny the reality of death until it is undeniably imminent. They also think of “dying” as a process that occurs in the last few days.
Whether you have a palliative care program or not, it behooves you to start getting on the radar of key decision-makers earlier in the process. Many people are hospice-phobic. They are petrified of the “H-word.” This does not serve them. And it makes life harder for you as far as reaching past that fear to show them how you can be of earlier assistance.
If you are not getting referrals in a time-appropriate manner, then perhaps you need to change the public’s perception of your expertise to match a more time-appropriate window.
I am reminded of a saying in research, “The rat is always right.” (Here’s the rat!) I in no way mean to imply that patients and families are rats. And I do not condone lab rat experiments. I bring this up with the most respectful intent, because the concept behind the saying is that no matter what your hypothesis is for an experiment, the rat’s response to your intervention is absolutely the right response for the rat. It’s your hypothesis that needs adjustment.
Try changing the community perception of you from the experts in death-and-dying to the experts in serious illness. People do not realize that dying is a multi-week, even multi-month process. We can try to educate them on that, but, “The rat is always right.” If the time frame the public currently associates with your services is inaccurate, then it’s your job to come up with a description of your services that matches the right time frame.
Use terms like “serious illness” liberally in your website and publications. If the public comes to perceive you as the expert in living day-to-day with serious illness (which you are), they will turn to you sooner than if they only perceive you as the expert in death-and-dying (aka “the last 3 days”).
This was my position in 2001 when I first started working with the Robert Wood Johnson Rallying Points program. We set up a website at www.seriousillness.org and established educational information for family caregivers there. The campaign?
“Caring for someone who is seriously ill? We can help.
Go to seriousillness.org/[yourcommunity].”
Over the decade (!) since that initiative, the grant expired and the website evolved and blossomed into one that is now shared by over 40 hospices in close to 60 cities. As one of my clients says, “With the area exclusive at seriousillness.org, I now own the vocabulary of serious illness. If someone is talking about serious illness, they are advertising my site.”
If you’d like to apply this research and reframe yourselves as the experts in serious illness, send me an email, or give me a call (707-477-0700). I’d love to talk more.
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