Public Relations Practice and Traditional Medical Institutions: A Case Study of Centre for Plant Medicine Research (CPMR)

Abstract

The practice of Public Relations has flourished all over the world as a distinctive management function which helps establish and maintain mutual lines of communication, understanding, acceptance and cooperation between an organization and the public. The purpose of this study was to determine how Public Relations shapes the growth and emergence of traditional health institutions particularly in Ghana by identifying public relations set-up in traditional medical institutions, outlining Public Relations strategies used by traditional medical institutions and determining the role of Public Relations in promoting herbal products in traditional medical institutions. Documentary review research was the proposed method utilizing search terms like Public Relations strategies’; ‘Public Relations promoting product’; ‘Public Relations communication’; ‘Public Relations channel communicate’ plugged into online databases including like Academic Search Complete, Academic Onefile and JSTOR, as well as Google Scholar. Besides efforts to uphold safety procedures in unusual times, documentary review research was chosen because of readily available data; inexpensive and economical compared to the other data collection methods; less time-consuming and reduced researcher prejudices Findings from the documentary research indicate that only Study C reported the existence of recognizable Public Relations system utilized Public Relations officers to disseminate information that helped increase patronage from 22.49 to 29.43 %. For both Study B and Study C, there was no recognizable Public Relations system in the health institution studied in the original research, without any recognizable Public Relations strategies for promoting products. This study concludes that while companies expend significant resources in the area of market research for the purpose of improving performance and boosting a firm’s bottom-line, an effective Public Relations system can be deployed to achieve similar results.