Partnering with patients to co-design our service tagline
For any healthcare service, understanding how best to present to the public what that service entails can be challenging. Here at GenesisCare, we know that talking with our patients is a great way to gain insights.
At a recent focus group held at our Norwest centre in NSW, we asked the attendees to help us select an appropriate tagline to describe our service. This focus group consisted mostly of patients who have or are receiving cancer treatment at GenesisCare, but also included carers of GenesisCare patients.
As well as running guided and open discussions about different aspects of their cancer care experience, we presented our focus group attendees with a list of ten different options for a short tagline to describe GenesisCare to the public. We took note of which options they liked and which options they didn’t like – and importantly, why.
The key message from our focus group was to keep it simple and avoid unnecessary medical jargon. For example patients:
- Preferred the term ‘cancer’ to ‘oncology’ when describing treatment or care services
- Liked the term ‘integrated’ in relation to cancer care services because it instilled a sense of continuity of care
- Liked the term ‘specialist’ as it imparted a sense of trustworthiness in the provider
Our focus group also highlighted that cancer is a very personal experience – patients often don’t want to be advertising to the world that they are undergoing cancer treatment. For this reason, our focus group suggested that external branding could be different from internal branding. While a tagline that incorporated the cancer care provider message may be used for marketing GenesisCare to the public, any products given to GenesisCare patients (e.g., a tote bag) should not include the tagline to help patients control their privacy.
Using these insights gained from our patients’ lived experience of cancer and GenesisCare as their service provider, we are now in the process of co-designing a tagline to better represent our service to the public.
