[bpsdb] Thanks to my sharp-eyed colleague at Thinking Is Dangerous, it's come to my attention that the Complementary and Natural Healthcare Council (aka "Ofquack") have finally posted some of the board minutes they promised to make available, from their May 2009 quarterly board meeting.

As expected, they appear to have learned from the debacle surrounding the original release of their minutes from November, choosing to keep those and the February minutes hidden away. The May minutes have been sanitised, and frankly contain very little in the way of interesting or useful information.

Except for the last point, which is rather curious:

"Public Relations and Marketing
The Board agreed a new contract with Mandate to carry forward CNHC’s PR programme. The agreed public relations and marketing strategy has been put in place in order that appropriate information is made available to the public; and to practitioners through their profession-specific journals so that they are aware that registration is now open to them. Additionally, the Board agreed to explore the possible production of promotional items, such as pens and key ring fobs, suitably printed with CNHC’s quality mark.

So the CNHC have decided to hire a PR team, which is a pretty extravagant move for an organisation with a limited income. Now before I continue, let's look again at the quote from their November meeting that caused so much controversy, also on PR strategy:

12 PR Strategy
MD reported that both CoChairs had met recently with Jon Hanlon (JH) and that two press releases had been agreed ready to distribute to the relevant organisations and publications. A list of contacts has been produced; all Board members were encouraged to submit details of other potential contacts, publications and organisations for inclusion in the PR database.

JG suggested the possible use of patients with ‘good news’ regarding complementary therapies on www.patientvoices.co.uk.

Now, back then they seemed to believe that it was part of their mandate to promote alternative medicine itself, which would of course be a massive conflict of interest for a regulatory body - a bit like OfCom buying adverts for BT. The quote from their May 2009 report is very vague, but suggests that they are targeting both professionals that they wish to get registered, but also the public themselves.

To be fair, there are legitimate reasons to target the public with a PR campaign. After all, if you want to regulate an industry and deal with customer complaints, then you need customers to be aware that you exist. However, the report doesn't make this clear, simply referring to the aim "that appropriate information is made available to the public." It's also worth pointing out that you hardly need a PR company to put some adverts in professional journals.

The PR company they've chosen for this are Mandate Communications, and interestingly they are strong in both politics and health. Somewhat ironically, their health page contains the headline:

"Evidence is everything."

Heh heh. Anyway, when it comes to what they actually do, it seems to be a mixture of getting stories into the media (the site boasts that 47% of their staff have been journalists), and of lobbying government and parliament. On that latter point, they note:

"We understand how power in the NHS works and who holds it. We know what policies will be effective and how to get them implemented."

Democracy in action. I should of course point out that there is no evidence that the CNHC would Mandate for this sort of purpose. They have Prince Charles for that!

So the question is what does this mean? Well there are two points that I think we can fairly make here. The first is that there are perfectly good reasons why a regulatory body may want to hire a PR firm, as stated above. The second is that the CNHC are spending hundreds of thousands of pounds of public money on their enterprise, and yet are being frustratingly vague on how this money is being spent. If it were to turn out, for example, that public money had been spent hiring a PR company to promote alt-med, as the CNHC seemed to want to do in their first meeting in November, then that would be very naughty.

But we'll see soon enough. If Mandate Communications are as good as they appear to be, then I would guess that we can expect to see a campaign launched in the near future that gets some stories into the press. It will be interesting to see what form that takes.

Oh, and if anyone can get me any of those CNHC branded goodies, I'd be very grateful.

Follow layscience.net on Twitter! @mjrobbins