Bed shortages. Hospital staff shortages. Prolonged waits in emergency rooms. Death on stretchers. Deprogramming of surgical procedures. Public hospitals, whose deficit has tripled in one year, can no longer meet the health needs of the population. The French Hospital Federation has thus noted a cumulative under-use of 3.5 million hospital stays between 2019 and 2023, due in particular to a 7% drop in hospitalization capacities in medicine, surgery and obstetrics mainly. due to lack of staff. Obviously, the measures taken to attract and retain public hospital caregivers were not enough.
With this in mind, the National Agency for Health and Medico-Social Performance (Anap) put online on March 7, 2024 a digital platform dedicated to attractiveness and loyalty in health and medico-social establishments, clearly in line with in a marketing strategy worthy of private companies, by borrowing its lexicon: “Develop your employer brand and activate the right levers, optimize your recruitment processes, make integration a lever of commitment, build loyalty: best practices and feedback”. Many hospital managements have engaged in these same marketing procedures, in particular developing employer brands, as in Bordeaux, Nice, Saint-Etienne or Nantes, helped by external communications companies (Aggelos, December 32, Bastille, Saguez & Partners). The values advocated to attract staff, now called collaborators, would in fact be supposed to summarize the entire social policy of these establishments, companies like any other.
The employer brand
The concept of employer branding (employer binding) was developed at the London Business School around twenty years ago as “a transposition of the commercial brand and the relationship it maintains with its customers, to the employer/employee/potential employee relationship”. At the center of the employer brand would be, for its defenders, “the employer’s ability to highlight the distinctive qualities which express its own values and culture, its strategy and the resulting choices, as well as the working conditions likely to differentiate it from its competitors”.
As indicated in the Nantes University Hospital magazine of February 2024, Thibault Saguez, of the Saguez & Partners agency who participated in its creation at the Nantes University Hospital – the cost not having been indicated by management – “a brand is the strategic foundation of an organization which sets a course for the medium-long term horizon and which allows it to be communicated in a positive way to all stakeholders”. Several agents (without information on their type) and patients participated in the process of building the brand, which recalls, in this journal sent to all CHU agents, the values binding the CHU community: high standards, solidarity ( with patients), curiosity (towards the other). The “new signature” of the CHU is based in particular on anchoring in the territory (“feet on the ground”), the “ingenious and activist care” state of mind, as a translation of “no Nantes side” by referring to the game of Nantes football, collective action “which integrates all the players in our ecosystem to improve the health of all”. In short: be happy with us, the positivity of this seductive speech suggests to us. Working conditions would then depend only on the unfailing commitment of the agents, proud to work in this establishment of excellence claimed to have a shared (idealized) identity.
The new public marketing
This empowering discourse, appealing to the emotions of hoped-for future “collaborators”, adopts that of emotional marketing theorized by professional marketers attentive to the way in which customers will experience the product to be sold. It is therefore a question for HR departments to explore, through these brands, almost the entire HR field, as suggested in 2019 by the French Hospital Federation (FHF), uncritically adopting these marketing practices: welcoming new employees, working conditions, training and career paths, communication, career management, quality of life at work. And to return to the Nantes game, the FHF article concludes: “In a context where many healthcare professions are currently experiencing recruitment pressure, or even a vocational deficit, the employer branding game deserves to be played! “.
It is clear that by adopting these entrepreneurial practices, the public hospital is taking a further step towards a form of creeping privatization of the public hospital, already underway through the development of techniques from the private sector: implementation of methods management and a specific financing method (activity-based pricing). Assuming that health has become a competitive market where each establishment, public or private, must attract the best talents, hospital marketing would only be the only possible way to fill the deficit in hospital staff. And this despite the sometimes exorbitant cost that these advertising campaigns will have on the budget – one million euros for the Nice University Hospital for example.
All that will remain is to install odorous fluid misters in the Emergency Department and play background music so that the public hospital finally attracts everyone, caregivers and patients, for an unforgettable customer experience.
Let’s reread Naomi Klein’s book “No Logo, the Tyranny of Brands”. It is urgent to denounce the commodification of public health, which risks leaving out the most precarious among us in the name of inhuman economic rationality. And bring together, apart from the logo, the conditions for the emancipation of care workers.
2024-03-28 17:52:40
#marketing #save #public #hospitals #Humanity
