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Senior Guest Lecturer
M. Ramachandran
Former Director, Kerala Media Academy · Author, Public Relations and Advertising · 35+ Years in Communication
Communication is half of hospital administration. He taught it for three decades.
M. Ramachandran (also published as Ramachandran Mammayil) is the former Director of the Kerala Media Academy, the Government of Kerala’s media-training institution, and the author of Public Relations and Advertising, published by the Academy in 2016. With 35+ years in marketing communication, PR, advertising and teaching, he is a Senior Guest Lecturer at Treneywann Management Studies, a hospital administration training institute in Vyttila, Kochi, where he teaches communication, patient relations and telemedicine to hospital administration students.
About M. Ramachandran
M. Ramachandran joined the Kerala Press Academy — now the Kerala Media Academy — in 1994, the year its Public Relations and Advertising Department was established, and spent the next decades building it. He worked as Lecturer and Course Co-ordinator, became Assistant Director in 2001 and Director in 2008. The PR and Advertising programme he ran is the Government of Kerala’s own post-graduate diploma in the subject, and generations of Kerala’s PR officers, advertising professionals and corporate communicators passed through it.
Before the Academy he was a working advertising professional. Through the 1980s he wrote copy for Madras agencies including Insight Advertising and Communication, Cancun Advertising and Efficient Publicities, and contributed to the Financial Express in Madras and Bombay. Later he added a decade of digital work — web research consultancy for a US company (2006–2010) and content writing for US platforms — which is why his teaching on communication is not confined to press releases: it covers the patient-facing web, WhatsApp and video channels a modern hospital actually uses.
He holds a BA in Political Science from Presidency College, Madras, and an MA in Political Science from Madurai Kamaraj University, and was a research scholar in the Department of Politics and Public Administration at the University of Madras. He also holds post-graduate diplomas in Business Management and in Russian, alongside specialised managerial training in public relations and financial management.
Why a Media Academy Director Teaches Hospital Administrators
This is not his first hospital classroom. Between 1995 and 2008, alongside his Academy work, he was guest faculty at the Indian Centre for Hospital Administration, Cochin — as well as at the Institute of Communication and Journalism (Calicut Press Club), Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan’s Rajendra Prasad Institute of Communication and Management, Bharata Matha College’s MBA programme, SAIMAT and the National Institute of Personnel Management, Cochin.
A hospital’s front office, patient-relations desk and public-relations officer do communication work all day: explaining a bill, calming a family, handling a complaint before it reaches the press, running the hospital’s WhatsApp and social presence, briefing a journalist after an incident. Treneywann’s syllabus covers these under healthcare marketing and patient relations and the digital-health module (ABDM, EHR, telemedicine). M. Ramachandran teaches those parts from the practitioner’s side — the side that wrote the copy, trained the PR officers and ran the department for the state.
The Book: Public Relations and Advertising (Kerala Media Academy, 2016)
Written under his full name, Ramachandran Mammayil, and published by the Kerala Media Academy in 2016, Public Relations and Advertising is the Academy’s own text for its PR and Advertising diploma. It covers the fundamentals a hospital administrator needs and rarely gets taught: what public relations is and is not, how to build goodwill with stakeholders, how press and media relations work, campaign planning, corporate communication, and the ethics of promotion.
Treneywann students on the patient-relations and hospital-PR modules are referred to it as a primary reference. Citation: Mammayil, R. (2016). Public Relations and Advertising. Kochi: Kerala Media Academy. ₹250.
Guest Lecture at Treneywann, Vyttila — Telemedicine
In September 2026 M. Ramachandran took a session for the hospital administration batch at the Vyttila, Kochi campus on telemedicine — part of Treneywann’s digital-health module. Telemedicine sits in the syllabus alongside ABDM and EHR as the part of hospital administration where communication with the patient happens entirely through a screen — the ground where his PR and communication background and Treneywann’s curriculum meet. Full report: guest lecture on telemedicine at Treneywann.
Areas of Expertise
- Public relations — stakeholder goodwill, press and media relations, crisis communication
- Advertising and marketing communication — copywriting, campaign planning, corporate communication
- Healthcare communication — patient relations, complaint handling, the hospital front office as a communication function
- Telemedicine and digital patient channels — communication discipline in remote consultation
- Teaching and curriculum design — set up and led a government PR & Advertising department for over a decade
Sessions at Treneywann
As Senior Guest Lecturer, M. Ramachandran takes guest sessions for both the 6-Month Diploma and the 1-Year Hospital Administration Course on:
- Patient relations and the hospital front office as a communication role
- Hospital public relations, media handling and reputation
- Telemedicine — communication and administration in remote care
Core hospital-operations teaching — NABH, billing, TPA, MRD and the live Hinall HMS lab — is led by B.V. Kumar, Head of Management Studies. See the full hospital administration course syllabus.
