Public Health Affairs

Category: Uncategorized

  • Great Old Article: Motivating Public Evacuation

    It’s dated, no doubt, and there is nary a mention of social media (they call the universe of messaging, “voice, electronic signals, or in print”), but this article seems to set the ground for all of the trainings I’ve attended in the last month. Published in 1991 in the Int’l Journal of Mass Emergencies and Disasters, Fitzpatrick and Mileti details the “psychological and social structural processes that result in [perceptions of risk].”

    Basically, this is the process for how people hear, decipher, internalize and decide to take action when given a warning message.

    I think that the authors don’t focus enough on the idea that repeated messages given over a variety of media assists the verification/confirmation need that most people have in emergency situations. (See Amanda Ripley’s book, The Unthinkable, for more on that.) But that could be that the science understanding the need for verification was still in its infancy, whereas today it is a central part of our social media “revolution.”

    Other than that criticism, much of the article holds up and is applicable to today’s emergency risk communicator. This is a highly recommended read (weighing in at only 11 short pages) that can be had for free at http://www.training.fema.gov/EMIWeb/downloads/IJEMS/ARTICLES/MOTIVATING%20PUBLIC%20EVACUATION.pdf .

  • Using Social Media in a Public Health Emergency

    The popularity of social media sites have greatly expanded the ability of people to communicate with one another. Local health departments have an opportunity to augment their strategic communications plans with these technologies. Through the deployment of an aggregator such as Ping, critical and sensitive information can be widely publicized throughout the social media space in an efficient and cost-effective manner.

    via brianmcdaniel.org

    Really interesting post by Brian McDaniel about ways to incorporate social media into public health emergency response. Why is this different from other situations? Because of the amazingly low public health staffing rates, Mr. McDaniel points out a way (Ping.fm) to streamline posting of emergency risk communication messages on lots of different media networks. Instead of posting to Facebook, then Twitter, then MySpace, then LinkedIn; you can post once and it’ll propagate in all of these networks. (Posterous does the same, too.)

  • What is the Face of the Matter?

    If you haven’t picked up the trend yet, this is a blog about PIO stuff. And a bit more. We’ll say (emergency) risk communication. Think ad campaigns, special populations outreach, mass communication methods, social media, crisis communication, disaster response, a smidgen of social marketing, and, well, other things that interest me at the time.

    The name of the blog refers to how people view a situation. Our understanding of particular situations is colored by two things. First, what we see; and second, what we hear. If an official stands in front of us and says the situation is under control just as the burning building behind him collapses in conflagration, we tend not to trust that person as much in the future. Conversely, properly placed notes of extreme caution during situations that seem to be of no worry can be ignored until it’s too late. To that end, it’s no longer good enough to respond to an emergency or crisis perfectly. If it truly is an emergency or crisis, the player must communicate about the situation and what they’re doing about it. Blame it on a 24/7 media, blame it on the bloggers, but understand that the face we present during a situation is as important as the facts of the situation. The face of the matter.