Abstract
The widespread use of the Internet provides people with easy access to information and ways of expressing opinions, which also poses high expectations to crisis management. In the era of social media, how the hospital can diminish the public’s negative emotion in crisis regarding physician-patient relationship by applying effective crisis communication strategies has attracted the attention of both academia and practice. Based on the situational crisis communication theory and social mediated crisis communication theory, this paper empirically examined the effectiveness of crisis communication strategies using a real physician-patient relationship crisis and the public’s behavior data. The results reveal that the negative emotion tendency is lower if the crisis event is communicated through the hospital’s official channel, is for the behavior of commenting, and is towards the hospital. This study contributes to the literature by enhancing the use of the two aforementioned theories in a healthcare context and to practice by providing practical suggestions for responding to physician-patient relationship crisis.
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Acknowledgement
This research is supported by the Humanity and Social Science foundation of Ministry of Education for Young Scholars (Grant No. 20YJC630214) and the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (Grant No. FRF-TP-20-022A1).
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Zhang, T., Liu, M., Yan, X., Jin, J. (2021). The Effectiveness of the Physician-Patient Relationship Crisis Communication Strategy. In: Wang, Y., Wang, W.Y.C., Yan, Z., Zhang, D. (eds) Digital Health and Medical Analytics. DHA 2020. Communications in Computer and Information Science, vol 1412. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-3631-8_9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-3631-8_9
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