I'm a mostly retired state public health agency bureau chief, brought back during the pandemic. I like this post a lot but it leaves important points out! You're wrong about a couple of things, Dr Jetelina: a) Good public health local leaders spend as much time as they have available working on communication, to their agency and the publ…
I'm a mostly retired state public health agency bureau chief, brought back during the pandemic. I like this post a lot but it leaves important points out! You're wrong about a couple of things, Dr Jetelina: a) Good public health local leaders spend as much time as they have available working on communication, to their agency and the public, but a good deal of that effort is finding channels of communication. We communicate with the people we serve most effectively via news media, at least in my state, and to do that we must cultivate the science and health reporters who decide what gets on the air or (in the old days) printed. I worked at that. What you say is certainly true: we didn't communicate nearly enough, and left out important elements. But we need more communication channels.
b) We are often trained in "crisis communication" and how to talk with reporters - there are at least two very good researchers/experts in this field whose training I found very helpful. You might talk about that field in a future post.
c) The communication that must be done cannot be only done by communication professionals - it's often best done by the local public health practitioners and scientists themselves. This is because they are the potential "trusted sources" and know the whole detailed story, thus how to best put it into words that are both understandable and correct....if they have that skill, which is trainable.
Thank you for these wonderful translations of the science. They are widely read in my agency.
I think your points are well taken. That said, a couple of quibbles. We often had people communicating who didn't have the right messaging. That could have been because we didn't have the right channels (science and health reporters who could translate the material appropriately) or because we gave garbled messages. A lot of the communication this time was via social media. I started in that realm because I felt obligated to counter misinformation and occasionally call out disinformation. That meant I had to handle my own content, and that sometimes didn't work well. That said, we need to plan to add trusted source social media channels to the mix. To become a trusted source, we need to routinely post and have authoritative and factual data available regularly. We can no longer solely depend on print and television media pathways as our outlets.
I believe we also need to start now, putting people of your calibre into the spotlight in the traditional channels, so you, and/or your successors, are recognized and considered go-to sources by the media. It's time for public health to have dedicated personnel to post authoritative information on social media.
During the course of the pandemic I found the torrent of information caused me to lapse into poor communications performance. I've long been able to speak, one-on-one with patients and families and explain what's happening clinically. In the case of the pandemic, the information flow I tried to keep up with, all of which was pertinent to what we're discussing, was such that I certainly couldn't read every article but still such that I often spent 30 or more hours per week (my wife once claimed "per day") critically reading the articles. I had to spend more time after several articles proved to have questionable methods, data or statistics and were highlighted as fraud after publication. Thus, I read EVERY article as if I were a reviewer. Which takes more time. And then translate the material into something useful which can add or change the understanding of the material overall.
I'd LOVE to know who your crisis communications experts are.
I'm a mostly retired state public health agency bureau chief, brought back during the pandemic. I like this post a lot but it leaves important points out! You're wrong about a couple of things, Dr Jetelina: a) Good public health local leaders spend as much time as they have available working on communication, to their agency and the public, but a good deal of that effort is finding channels of communication. We communicate with the people we serve most effectively via news media, at least in my state, and to do that we must cultivate the science and health reporters who decide what gets on the air or (in the old days) printed. I worked at that. What you say is certainly true: we didn't communicate nearly enough, and left out important elements. But we need more communication channels.
b) We are often trained in "crisis communication" and how to talk with reporters - there are at least two very good researchers/experts in this field whose training I found very helpful. You might talk about that field in a future post.
c) The communication that must be done cannot be only done by communication professionals - it's often best done by the local public health practitioners and scientists themselves. This is because they are the potential "trusted sources" and know the whole detailed story, thus how to best put it into words that are both understandable and correct....if they have that skill, which is trainable.
Thank you for these wonderful translations of the science. They are widely read in my agency.
jerry.gibson.sc@gmail.com
I think your points are well taken. That said, a couple of quibbles. We often had people communicating who didn't have the right messaging. That could have been because we didn't have the right channels (science and health reporters who could translate the material appropriately) or because we gave garbled messages. A lot of the communication this time was via social media. I started in that realm because I felt obligated to counter misinformation and occasionally call out disinformation. That meant I had to handle my own content, and that sometimes didn't work well. That said, we need to plan to add trusted source social media channels to the mix. To become a trusted source, we need to routinely post and have authoritative and factual data available regularly. We can no longer solely depend on print and television media pathways as our outlets.
I believe we also need to start now, putting people of your calibre into the spotlight in the traditional channels, so you, and/or your successors, are recognized and considered go-to sources by the media. It's time for public health to have dedicated personnel to post authoritative information on social media.
During the course of the pandemic I found the torrent of information caused me to lapse into poor communications performance. I've long been able to speak, one-on-one with patients and families and explain what's happening clinically. In the case of the pandemic, the information flow I tried to keep up with, all of which was pertinent to what we're discussing, was such that I certainly couldn't read every article but still such that I often spent 30 or more hours per week (my wife once claimed "per day") critically reading the articles. I had to spend more time after several articles proved to have questionable methods, data or statistics and were highlighted as fraud after publication. Thus, I read EVERY article as if I were a reviewer. Which takes more time. And then translate the material into something useful which can add or change the understanding of the material overall.
I'd LOVE to know who your crisis communications experts are.
Thank you for your detailed comments.
Gerry