Author: Jim

One of my most favorite public health social media properties is the
Boston Public Health Commission’s Facebook
page. With multiple posts per
day on everything from healthy recipes, to tips on healthy living, to
Board of Health decisions, posted in both English and Spanish, that
page alone is just about as best practice-y as it gets.

But we’re talking emergencies here, and well, Boston had a doozy a
couple of years back. A massive water main broke in May
2010,
causing a “boil water order” to be issued to more than two million
Massachusetts residents. Now, those of you in emergency risk
communication know how confusing a “boil water order” can be, so
imagine having to issue it to millions of folks in rural, suburban and
urban areas, all of whom were potentially in immediate danger from the
water they use to drink, cook and clean with.

The first tool BPHC reached for? Social media. With frequent updates
on both Facebook and Twitter, they were able to break free of the news
cycle and push unfiltered updates and breaking news to residents of
the area, and—just as important, I say—people who didn’t live in the
area, but care about someone who might be affected. According to one
review by a Tufts University
professor,
BPHC also utilized Twitter not only to push information on the
situation out, but also to field questions, redirect misinformation
and quell rumors. True two-way communication with vast swaths of the
public.

While I’m focusing on the social media aspect of the Boston response,
I would be remiss if I didn’t note that this outreach was but one
medium in a constellation of media, ranging from police bullhorns to
carefully orchestrated press conferences. It is but one tool in the
box, and one that Boston Public Health utilized extremely well.

More video! (Can you tell I’m a bit obsessed?) While today’s
selection utilizes YouTube as the primary dissemination vehicle like
yesterday’s post,
the reason why is a bit different. That was intended to demonstrate.
Today we look to reassure and inform.

I had the great pleasure of meeting Mr. Kerry
Shearer at a JIC/PIO
training earlier this
year, and if you ever get the opportunity to hear him, I highly
recommend it. I say this not only because he’s a dynamic speaker, but
because he gets emergency public information dissemination via social
media better than just about anyone else in public health. And his
coup de grace (thus far) is the yeoman’s work he did at the
Sacramento County Public Health
Department
during the 2009 H1N1 influenza pandemic.

As the pandemic was shaping up Mr. Shearer grabbed hold of the
Department’ YouTube channel and used it—in some cases daily—to ensure
that the residents of Sacramento County got the very latest updates
and other useful information about the pandemic.

From making press conferences available—in full—to the
public, to
updates on wait times at the
clinics, to what
to expect when you show up at a vaccine
clinic, Mr.
Shearer and the folks at Sacramento County Public Health truly set the
bar for openness, transparency and availability.

And really, if you’ve got a few minutes to watch the What To
Expect video, do;
it’s excellent.

While our fading memories and historical revisionism have turned the
2009 pandemic of H1N1 influenza into little more than a footnote at
best and a joke at worst, it was not that way at the time.

It was scary! We had visions of 1918. Bodies in the streets and
Contagion-like public unrest. People were, rightly, asking questions
about masking, about shelter-in-place kits, about vaccines. And while
the CDC did an amazing job utilizing old and new methods of
communications to get their message out, not everything can be
communicated with words on the screen, on paper, over the radio, or by
talking head. And that’s the essence of today’s social media emergency
community in public health best practice.

On April 29, 2009, in the very first hours of H1N1, CDC posted a
video to YouTube about donning (putting on) and doffing (taking off)
an N95 respirator mask. While it seems like an easy thing to do, if
you’re staring in the face of a pandemic and the prospect of not
enough masks to go around, how you put on and take off a mask can
make them last longer. And keep you protected from the virus.

Obviously shot on the CDC’s campus with actors who were, well, whoever
was there and had a few minutes to spare. It not only filled a
critical need (disseminating visual information), but did it on the
cheap. Nothing fancy here. Any one of us could have done the same with
a smartphone and a couple of masks. Any public health department could
have done it. Maybe next time we will.

Check it out here.