Communication Strategy in Healthcare Organizations During Covid-19 Crisis: Insights from the Italian Context

This study analyzes how healthcare organizations (HCOs)’s General Directors (GD) shaped the communication strategies toward internal and external stakeholders to keep fulfilling the organization mission during the COVID-19 crisis. Italy has been chosen as the study setting being one of the first Western countries to be heavily affected by the pandemic. Thus, a qualitative study has been designed to get an in-depth understanding of how the HCOs’ GDs, the crisis managers, defined and adopted the communication strategies both toward the internal and the external stakeholders. The findings allow to define the type of communication strategies that the crisis managers adopted towards stakeholders, more precisely a personalized communication was often used with workforce as key internal stakeholder, while a collective communication strategy was mainly adopted with external stakeholders.