Abstract
Biological risk management in public health focuses on the impact of outbreaks on health, the economy, and other systems and on ensuring biosafety and biosecurity. To address this broad range of risks, the International Health Regulations (IHR, 2005) request that all member states build defined core capacities, risk communication being one of them. While there is existing guidance on the communication process and on what health authorities need to consider to design risk communication strategies that meet the requirements on a governance level, little has been done on implementation because of a number of factors, including lack of resources (human, financial, and others) and systems to support effective and consistent capacity for risk communication. The international conference on “Risk communication strategies before, during and after public health emergencies” provided a platform to present current strategies, facilitate learning from recent outbreaks of infectious diseases, and discuss recommendations to inform risk communication strategy development. The discussion concluded with 4 key areas for improvement in risk communication: consider communication as a multidimensional process in risk communication, broaden the biomedical paradigm by integrating social science intelligence into epidemiologic risk assessments, strengthen multisectoral collaboration including with local organizations, and spearhead changes in organizations for better risk communication governance. National strategies should design risk communication to be proactive, participatory, and multisectoral, facilitating the connection between sectors and strengthening collaboration.
Highlights
Meeting ReportBiological Risks to Public Health: Lessons from an International Conference to Inform the Development of National Risk Communication Strategies
Petra Dickmann, MD, PhD, is a Consultant, Deutsche Gesellschaft fur Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ) GmbH, Berlin, Germany
Communication as a multidimensional process in risk communication, broaden the biomedical paradigm by integrating social science intelligence into epidemiologic risk assessments, strengthen multisectoral collaboration including with local organizations, and spearhead changes in organizations for better risk communication governance
Summary
Biological Risks to Public Health: Lessons from an International Conference to Inform the Development of National Risk Communication Strategies. There is some information on how to improve the communication process in a crisis[5,6,7] or for particular situations, such as public health emergencies,[8] in high security laboratories,[9] during an influenza pandemic,[10] or, more generally, to evaluate biosafety and biosecurity from a risk communication perspective.[11] There is a growing body of literature that elicits the information needs of the general public—for example, after biosecurity events[12,13] or infectious disease outbreaks14—or particular at-risk groups While these are very helpful in meeting specific communication requirements, they mostly focus on the information needs of the public and remain in the domain of conventional understanding of risk communication as the timely conveyance of information from experts to a lay population.
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