Crisis communication course provides new tools to state health officials

Be first, be right, be credible. That's the crisis communication mantra for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. But it's hard to save lives with the right message when you're competing with a flood of misinformation and noise.

To help local health officials and first responders learn critical health-crisis communication techniques, the Department of Public and Ecosystem Health in the College of Veterinary Medicine has developed a two-day training program for the New York State Department of Homeland Security and Emergency Services.

"There was a lot of backlash about communications during the pandemic, and a lot of the advice given was politicized for local responders," said Danielle Eiseman, health impacts partnership lead in the Department of Public and Ecosystem Health. "It presented health officials and first responders with a significant challenge, especially if they had to wait for information from the state or the CDC."

Public health officials need to better communicate to diverse internal and external audiences during health crises, requiring strong theoretical understanding of language and behavior, a firm grasp of scientific and public health issues and rigorous practice, Eiseman said. Officials can communicate effectively only if they are also skilled in these other aspects of crisis response.

Eiseman wrote the materials for the two-day course in public health risk communications, which was held first June 26 and 27 at the State Preparedness Training Center in Oriskany, New York. A second training course is scheduled for Oct. 23 and 24, drawing together state and local public health officials, first responders, emergency managers and other public sector stakeholders involved in public-health emergencies.

Led by personnel from Cornell Cooperative Extension, the Department of Public and Ecosystem Health and other departments, the training included hands-on tabletop exercises where participants apply newly learned concepts to real-world situations, such as responding to public outrage, combatting misinformation spread on social media, keeping the public safe from an emerging, unknown outbreak and building partnerships with key stakeholders.

Social media is especially tricky, Eiseman said, because it so often opens the door to misinformation, even malicious disinformation.

"It can be very difficult to communicate in the right way via social media. Recognizing this, we said let's give people resources that they need to build up the skills in this area," she said. But she cautions that a one-size-fits-all approach doesn't work, pointing to new communications materials from the Consumer Product Safety Commission targeting Gen Z with electronic dance music about taking off your headphones when you cross the street.

"We played the song and everyone in the room said, 'I don't get this.' It's because they weren't the target audience," Eiseman said.

Through instruction and workshopping, with many scenarios and factsheets designed by Sabine Jamal, the outreach chair of Graduate Students in Public Health, attendees learn from real-world examples. They responded to high arsenic levels in a local playground, a meningitis outbreak before the holidays and more, the scenarios "ground-truthed" by Isaac Weisfuse, an adjust professor in the Department of Public and Ecosystem Health.

"Participants work through the good, the bad and the ugly when it comes to communicating with different stakeholders in a crisis," Eiseman said. The response to the training, she said, has been overwhelmingly positive with growing interest from other agencies to hold more of these trainings across New York state.

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