The Global Health Security Agenda (GHSA) was launched in February 2014 to advance a world safe and secure from infectious disease threats, to bring together nations from all over the world to make new, concrete commitments, and to elevate global health security as a national leaders-level priority.
GHSA acknowledges the essential need for a multilateral and multi-sectoral approach to strengthen both the global capacity and nations' capacity to prevent, detect, and respond to infectious diseases threats whether naturally occurring, deliberate, or accidental – capacity that once established would mitigate the devastating effects of Ebola, MERS, other highly pathogenic infectious diseases, and bioterrorism events.
An essential part of keeping countries safe and secure from infectious disease threats is enabling people to make decisions to protect themselves and those around them. This may include educating the public about what symptoms to look for, how and when to report illness in family members, what to do when a family member may be or is diagnosed as infected, and how to prevent disease and infection in the first place. This is sometimes known as Risk Communication.
From the risk manager's perspective, the purpose of risk communication is to help residents of affected communities understand the processes of risk assessment and management, to form scientifically valid perceptions of the likely hazards, and to participate in making decisions about how risk should be managed. Risk communication tools are written, verbal, or visual statements containing information about risk.
In this Trending Topic, the Compass provides a variety of proven tools for risk communication (listed below under "Tools") and examples of risk communication efforts in specific country settings (listed below under "Examples.")
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A young girl at a celebration for the lifting of an Ebola quarantine in Kambia, Sierra Leone. © 2015 Samuel Boland, Courtesy of Photoshare
The Global Health Security Agenda (GHSA) was launched in February 2014 to advance a world safe and secure from infectious disease threats, to bring together nations from all over the world to make new, concrete commitments, and to elevate global health security as a national leaders-level priority.
A joint external evaluation (JEE) is a voluntary, collaborative, multisectoral process to assess country capacities to prevent, detect and rapidly respond to public health risks whether occurring naturally or due to deliberate or accidental events.
The recommendations in these guidelines provide overarching, evidence-based guidance on how risk communication should be practiced in an emergency. The recommendations also guide countries on building capacity for communicating risk during health emergencies.
The Global Health Security Agenda (GHSA) was launched in February 2014 to advance a world safe and secure from infectious disease threats, to bring together nations from all over the world to make new, concrete commitments, and to elevate global health security as a national leaders-level priority.
An online course which covers several aspects of emergency risk communication.
CDC’s Crisis and Emergency Risk Communication (CERC) manual is built around psychological and communication sciences, studies in issues management, and practical lessons learned from emergency responses.
This field workbook supports the implementation of the interagency (FAO, UNICEF, WHO) “Communication for Behavioural Impact (COMBI): A toolkit for behavioural and social communication in outbreak response”.
The SBCC Emergency Helix describes a communication blueprint for strengthening community stability, health system adaptability and the evolution toward resilience.
Crisis and emergency risk communication (CERC) )is the strategy used to provide information that allows an individual, stakeholders, or an entire community to make the best possible decisions during a crisis emergency event. The purpose of a public health response to a crisis is to efficiently and effectively reduce and prevent illness, injury, and death and return individuals and communities to normal.
This presentation is a step by step guide for understanding crisis/outbreak communication, communication crucial to managing a crisis, explaining the WHO Outbreak Guidelines, and working with the media.
PILLARS Guides aim to increase confidence among group members, so that they can successfully manage change within their own situation without the need for outside help.
This infographic displays information about the causes, symptoms, diagnosis and treatment of plague as well as providing an explanation of the history of the disease.
This Ebola Communication Preparedness Implementation Kit (I-Kit) provides national and local stakeholders, as well as program managers, with key considerations and a roadmap for instituting and implementing critical, relevant, practical and timely communication for responding to the threat of an Ebola Virus Disease (EVD) outbreak.
OpenWHO is WHO’s interactive, web-based, knowledge-transfer platform offering online courses to improve the response to health emergencies. OpenWHO enables the Organization and its key partners to transfer life-saving knowledge to large numbers of frontline responders.
In social and behavior change communication (SBCC), a message is a statement containing key points of information that a program wants to communicate to an audience to encourage behavior change. Message design is the process of connecting insights about the priority audience with key information the audience needs to know in order to make the change the program desires. Successful, well-designed messages are simple, memorable, easily understood, culturally appropriate and meaningful to the audience. Their design stems from a clear creative brief that outlines what the communication intervention aims to achieve.
This fact sheet offers basic cholera prevention messages for health communication projects:
"The main purpose of this document is to offer recommendations to prevent the emergence and spread of misinformation in the course of a major infectious disease outbreak, and how misinformation can be corrected. Additionally, the document seeks to provide a background context in relation to the origins and persistent effect of misinformation and rumours in time. Finally, the document discusses key components of outbreak communication, such as presentation of scientific uncertainties and information gaps, and their role in the emergence of misinformation.
This resource, created by the Patient Information Forum, provides a kind of checklist on how to communicate risks carefully and thoughtfully to patients.
Uganda is considered a "hot zone" for infectious diseases. Uganda is particularly vulnerable to epidemics because of its unique location near the Congo Basin; its close connection with other countries; the risk from natural disasters; and the ever-present threat of evolving pathogens or antimicrobial resistance.
Suaahara was a five year (2011-2016) project funded by USAID aimed to improve the nutritional status of women and children in 41 districts of Nepal. Suaahara developed and implemented the integrated Bhanchhin Aama (“Mother knows best”) cohesive platform which involved multiple sectors (Nutrition, Agriculture, WASH, Health Service Promotion, Family Planning), linked Suaahara partners, government and others, and had multiple messages for every target audience (pregnant women, husbands, newly married women, mothers-in-law, etc.).
This toolkit, created by the California (US) Department of Health, provides detailed resource materials to assist in effectively managing and communicating during an emergency or crisis.
These materials were produced in response to critical health concerns following the 2015 earthquake.
This is a flyer regarding water, sanitation and hygiene, reproduced during the post-earthquake period in Nepal in the spring of 2015.
The purpose of this plan, developed shortly after the devestating earthquakes in Nepal in the spring of 2015, is to communicate health risks with communities directly affected by the earthquake in 14 priority districts by focusing on interpersonal communications, dissemination of information, and community mobilization through community volunteers, including frontline health workers and civil society organizations for the immediate six month period May-October 2015.
Suaahara was a five year (2011-2016) project funded by USAID aimed to improve the nutritional status of women and children in 41 districts of Nepal.
This document focuses on quickly developing an effective communication strategy for addressing Ebola. It does not address other aspects of handling Ebola such as treatment, quarantine control, infection prevention, medical staff training, monitoring, logistics and epidemiology.
This document is intended to be used to guide risk communication and community engagement (RCCE) work which is central to stopping the outbreak and preventing its further amplification.
The goals of this communication strategy are:
This document was used in a workshop in West Africa, to help program managers learn how to develop preparedness and response plans for a potential Ebola outbreak. It includes an outbreak scenario and potential actions and responses by many parties to the outbreak.
The goal of this framework is to provide an overview of how Risk Communication and Community Engagement (RCCE) resources and activities need to be prepared for across different response pillars among provinces and countries neighbouring North Kivu, Democratic Republic of Congo.
This document compiles current information and key messages about the Ebola outbreak in Liberia to inform activities designed to raise awareness, mobilize communities, and promote safe behaviors to stop the spread of Ebola in Liberia.
This poster describes what Ebola is, its signs and symptoms, how it is spread, how to prevent it, and how to treat it.
This website is made possible by the support of the American People through the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) under the Breakthrough-ACTION Project, supported by USAID’s Office of Population and Reproductive Health, Bureau for Global Health, under Cooperative Agreement #AID-OAA-A-17-00017 with the Johns Hopkins University.
Breakthrough-ACTION is based at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health’s Center for Communication Programs (JHU∙CCP). The contents of this website are the sole responsibility of JHU∙CCP. The information provided on this website is not official U.S. Government information and does not necessarily represent the views or positions of USAID, the United States Government, or The Johns Hopkins University.