The Weakest Link: Why specialised networks are essential in healthcare communications

Every year GLOBALHealthPR agencies come together for our Annual General Meeting, AGM for short, and it’s a celebrated event! Months in advance partners start circling the dates on calendars, eagerly anticipating the opportunity to learn, share and connect.

This past January we welcomed James Yi as the Executive Director for GHPR’s APAC regional office. Not only has James brought a wealth of experience in regional healthcare communications, but he’s also provided invaluable perspective on the network itself – and what he sees as our value to clients. James took a turn at the mic during the AGM, sharing his reflections from his first 100 days, and one of the first things he talked about was the strength of the network, commenting:

“A network is only as strong as its weakest agency.”

It’s an intuitive statement, but the context surrounding it is important – especially in the healthcare space. Most global holding companies lack true health expertise in many, if not the majority, of markets they operate in. This means you have non-specialist communicators implementing in a highly specialised and regulated area, leading to huge variance in the levels of success achieved locally.

At GLOBALHealthPR, health communications is all we do. Every agency that is part of our network is a true expert in both health and communications in their respective markets. Supported by a strong client-first infrastructure, our agencies work together seamlessly to deliver around the globe.

We are often approached by agencies from all over world that are interested in joining the network. Within each market we only have one partner agency, and their focus must be on healthcare. For these reasons we are highly selective about those choices – our partner relationships are built to last, and becoming a partner isn’t easy.

Every year when I come back from the AGM I think about how lucky I am to be working with a network of partners—and friends—who share my passion for healthcare and communications.  We’re bound by a common vision of building the best healthcare communications network in the world. Rome wasn’t built in a day (fun fact, Ancient Rome took somewhere in the range of 760 years to reach its peak population, or over 200,000 days); we’re only 16 years into our mission and continuing to add strength each year.

Our network is built such that it doesn’t have a weakest agency. And that’s a big piece of how we are able to deliver exceptional communications globally, regionally and locally for our clients.