GP and Medeconomics

Gorkana was joined yesterday morning (20 October) by Emma Bower, editor of Haymarket titles GP and Medeconomics. At the packed-out media briefing, she revealed how readers have reacted to GP since the title went digital-only last year, how Medeconomics and GP fit into Haymarket’s wider medical portfolio and how PRs can help with content for the titles.

GP and Medeconomics form part of publisher Haymarket’s family of healthcare brands, which also includes MIMS and MIMS Learning.

More than 50 years old, GP is a major UK B2B healthcare title in the UK and aims to be “essential reading for all UK-based family doctors”.

Digital-only since July 2015, GP offers its readers the latest news, careers advice, clinical education and opinion via GPonline.com and its GP Weekly app, which provides a round-up of the title’s best content every Friday.

Medeconomics is a subscription site that provides GP practices with expert advice to help them run their businesses effectively and improve patient care.

GP media briefing4

Emma Bower talking to Gorkana’s head of news and content, Philip Smith

Here are a just a few key top tips that Bower, a former editor of Independent Nurse, revealed at yesterday’s briefing:

GP

GPs are incredibly busy people – they’re under huge pressure, so going digital-only last year was a good move – “more paper is not the best way to communicate with them”, said Bower. There is a daily news alert that goes out at around 11am (the biggest driver of traffic), as well as a series of more specialised weekly bulletins (i.e. Training Update, Practice Briefing and GP Education). The team is about to launch an alert centred around locum GPs.

Medeconomics

Medeconomics focuses on GP practices and is aimed at GP partners and practice managers. Like GPs, practice managers are extremely overworked, said Bower, so the title aims to provide practical information to help them day-to-day. This includes expert content on finance, legal, HR issues as well as case studies and information to help them improve patient services.

The “shop window” of Haymarket’s medical content

GP and Medeconomics aim to distil information into easy-to-understand stories. “We want our readers to feel they can come to us for a balanced view of what’s going on. We’ll always say to people who write for us think about what your story means for GPs.” Stories that tend to do well include anything to do with workforce and GP recruitment issues and changes to the NHS that will affect the way GPs work.

Working with PRs

The team tends to deal more with in-house PR teams and charities, although Bower is open to building up relationships with agencies. Surveys are used a lot, but PRs need to bear in mind that they must have a relevance to GPs and have a positive story to tell. She is less interested in “GP bashing” stories. The team uses a bank of experts, but is happy to be offered more comment from appropriate individuals. Always email if you want to contact the team.

PR and comms professionals from a variety of sectors attended the media briefing, which was chaired by Gorkana’s head of news and content, Philip Smith.

Katie Packham, agency marketing manager at Racepoint Global, said: “As always, this morning’s Gorkana Media briefing was an informative and interesting event. Targeted to the healthcare sector, it gave us an insight into the target audience, content they respond well to, future topics of discussion and the reasoning behind taking both publications online.”

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