Communication strategies for product recalls in the healthcare business

Master's Thesis from the year 2007 in the subject Communications - Public Relations, Advertising, Marketing, grade: 1.3, Anglia Ruskin University (Ashcroft International Business School), language: English, abstract: After a series of cardiac implantable device recalls hit the industry in the year 2005 the question of a favourable corporate communication strategy about inevitable product recalls was raised. Knowing that it is impossible to produce 100% failure free products I was personally interested in seeing how such recalls occurred and how successful they were handled by the different companies from a communication perspective. This thesis analyses such device recalls since the year 2000 and attempts to identify a favourable communication strategy for the companies involved in such recalls in the future. Qualitative analysis was performed on various secondary data sources to find positive and negative aspects of different communication strategies for the affected companies. Four companies could be analysed, where three provided significant results, which were used for final recommendations. Those recommendations are provided to support active corporate communi-cation. The basis of the recommended communication strategy is as follows: Provide disclosure about probabilities of malfunctions while supportive to the most powerful stakeholders, which are the physicians and the regulatory authorities. When one company faces a recall it is favourable to take accountability and give advice to physicians about how to respond to their patients, because they are facing the problem of having all the information at hand without an adequate guideline which summarises a clinical decision on how to act and how to weight risks of keeping the existing device versus the risks of device change-out procedures. Keywords: communication strategy, crisis management, corporate communication, healthcare business