What factors are important in formulating a community hospital’s reputation?

Abstract

There is a growing body of literature on the importance of corporate reputation and reputation management, but scant research that looks at reputation in the context of a community hospital. Most hospital administrators agree that reputation is important and suggest that it has an impact on operations, but the nature of hospital reputation and how it is formed is not well understood. This study explores hospital reputation through a comprehensive literature review, in-depth interviews with six Ontario hospital CEOs, two patient/community member focus groups and an on-line survey with patients and community members. The results of this study strongly suggest that many models of corporate reputation are not directly applicable to hospitals especially when it comes to factors such as leadership, innovation and financial performance that appear in most corporate reputation models and measurement tools. Personal experience and word of mouth are used to evaluate a hospital on desired outcomes, and this research suggested that those outcomes are strongly related to emotional appeal (feeling cared about) as opposed to clinical outcomes or results. ©Journal of Professional Communication, all rights reserved.