Kronos Healthcare Study

Challenge: Kronos is a global company specialising in workforce management. As part of the ongoing public relationship campaign, Howorth was engaged by Kronos to identify a newsworthy issue outside their typical scope on which Kronos could offer a fresh perspective, which would in turn generate positive media coverage and support the overall sales drive.

Strategy: Howorth recently worked with Kronos on a case study with the Macquarie University Hospital. The study generated much media interest and as such, signalled a definite area of opportunity for the team to further explore.

Focusing on the Healthcare sector, Howorth set about creating a research campaign that would help to support future conversations for Kronos with media as well as potential customers. Supported by good customer examples, this would present a very compelling reason for media and influencers alike to listen to what Kronos had to say.

Howorth’s initial research revealed that despite healthcare being a vital part of the economy -and important to every Australian, there were significant pain points regarding the welfare of nurses and the fact that the industry had not benefited from the technology revolution that is fundamentally changing whole industries.

Howorth engaged and interviewed over 200 healthcare professionals from across the country as part of the “Nursing Pulse Check” survey regarding their concerns and pain-points about the industry. The survey examined the working conditions of Australian nurses, the attitudes they have toward their jobs, as well as opinions on technology and the future of the industry.

The research revealed that half of Australian nurses planned to leave the profession within next ten years.  With work-related stress being such a large factor, as well as nurses indicating that they extend themselves to their limits to manage their workloads, the results strongly indicated the need for healthcare management and employees to collaboratively review current workforce management methods.

Results:  As a part of the media strategy to support the launch of the survey, Howorth proactively pitched to over 50 media targets across both print and broadcast publications by drawing upon three main angles:

• General news angle: critical shortage of nurses in the Australian healthcare industry;
• Technology angle: the ability of the healthcare industry to adopt technology such as the roll out of the recent e-health initiative;
• Health angle: dissatisfaction of nurses suffering from stress and burn-out.

Howorth secured and facilitated eight media pre-briefings, as well as six on-the-day radio interviews for Peter Harte, VP APAC for Kronos.. These briefings resulted in a total of 119 pieces of coverage. This includes ninety-five pieces of coverage across broad spectrum of news, health and technology publications, including The Daily Telegraph, Canberra Times, The Age, News.com.au and Courier Mail. A further twenty two pieces of broadcast coverage were secured in the form of live radio Q&A, news grabs and pre-recordings. In addition, the survey findings featured on two top tier free-to-air and pay television news broadcasts.