Disasters and emergencies such as tornadoes, earthquakes, infectious disease outbreaks, and even acts of terrorism, can occur at any time. During these events, public health professionals and others need to be prepared with the necessary skills to care for themselves and their communities. As noted in the report, The Public Health Workforce: An Agenda for the 21st Century, the public health workforce requires up-to-date knowledge and skills to deliver quality essential public health services. The importance of having a prepared public health workforce that is able to prevent, respond to, and rapidly recover from public health threats is critical for our nation’s health.1 The more skills people have about important topics such as developing a preparedness plan, effectively communicating during a crisis, and efficiently responding to the community, the more lives can be saved during an emergency.
The Public Health Foundation (PHF) understands that effective communication is a “resource multiplier” during a crisis, disaster, or emergency. Many of the expected negative individual and community behaviors can be mitigated with effective emergency risk communication, which encompasses the urgency of disaster communication with the need to convey risks and benefits to stakeholders and the public. Emergency risk communication provides expert opinion provided by an official - under intense time pressure and with less than complete information - to empower the public's decision making and advance a behavior that allows for rapid and efficient recovery from the event.
In an emergency situation, it is imperative to communicate clearly, simply, and frankly. It is PHF’s goal to bring effective communication resources and training to the public health workforce by training state, tribal, local, and territorial health department staff and others. PHF offers a wealth of crisis communication resources, including
on-site communication training to assist your organization with creating a communications plan that delivers the right message, in the right place, at the right time, to the target audience. For more information about bringing communication training to your organization, contact Russell Rubin at
rrubin@phf.org.
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TRAIN, the nation’s premier learning management network for professionals who protect the public’s health, for related courses:
Other resources:
1. http://www.cdc.gov/phpr/capabilities/DSLR_capabilities_July.pdf, Accessed Nov 19, 2014