Building a Global Crisis Communications Capability in the Healthcare Sector
A global biopharmaceutical company sought to strengthen its ability to anticipate, prepare for and respond to high impact issues across its worldwide operations. Speyside Group partnered with the client's global corporate affairs team to identify its highest priority risks, modernize its crisis communications playbook and test organizational readiness through live simulation exercises.
Background
As a company with operations spanning multiple therapeutic franchises, functions and countries, the client faced a wide and evolving range of potential risks in terms of patient access, product safety, supply, political and government relations, physical safety, security, and workforce related issues. Maintaining a consistent, ready-to-activate crisis response capability across such a complex international footprint required a structured, company-wide approach rather than isolated market-level plans.
Approach
Working closely with the client's global team, Speyside identified the organization's top risks by function, franchise and country. This process produced a shortlist of issues assessed as both likely to occur and high impact, spanning patient access, safety and supply, political and government relations, physical safety and security, and workforce related risks.
Building on this risk mapping, Speyside developed a set of crisis scenarios with defined escalation steps, helping teams think through how an issue could move from a no situation to a locally owned matter and, ultimately, to an international or global situation. The existing crisis communications playbook was reviewed and upgraded, including the development of a new interactive, online version.
To test the strengthened framework, Speyside prepared a diverse set of scripted scenarios reflecting different geographies and functions and ran the client's first set of crisis simulation exercises. Workshop guides were created so the client's own communications teams could run future exercises internally, and following the roll out of training, Speyside provided recommendations to strengthen crisis process and implementation globally.
Impact
The engagement gave the client a structured, company wide view of its highest priority crisis risks for the first time, replacing an ad hoc, market by market approach with a single framework spanning all franchises, functions and countries. The modernized, interactive crisis communications playbook equipped teams to move quickly and consistently from early warning to a coordinated response, while the first crisis simulation exercises tested that framework under realistic conditions and built the client's own internal capability to sustain crisis preparedness training over time. Together, these workstreams left the organization considerably better prepared to identify, escalate and manage significant issues before they could affect patients, operations or reputation.