What became immediately clear during the COVID-19 pandemic, is that the role of primary prevention and health promotion dropped away. Primary prevention workforces tended to be redeployed in an understandable shoring-up of resources to mitigate significant risk to the health system.

Nonetheless, the need to ensure that the key messages on gender equality and the impact of the pandemic on women’s health and wellbeing was still vital. Ongoing support to build capacity, capability and resilience of workforce at times of disaster is also important.

Health Messaging

During public health emergencies, people need to know what health risks they face and what actions they can take to protect their health and lives. Accurate information provided early, often, and in languages and channels that people understand, trust and use, enables people to make choices and take actions to protect themselves, their families and communities from threatening health hazards (World Health Organisation, 2017). For WHISE, the role of being able to coordinate effective messaging built on evidence in a timely way, was a priority during the start of COVID-19.

The World Health Organisation’s guidance on communicating risk in public health emergencies tells us that emergency risk communication highlights the importance of building trust and engaging with organisations. Specifically, the World Health Organisation (2017) have advised that communication at times of emergency needs to:

 

  1. Build trust by linking communication to services in transparent, timely and easy to understand way.
  2. Deliver to impacted populations.
  3. Be empowering (allow populations to take action)
  4. Occur across multiple platforms.
  5. Communicate uncertainties - for instance, what authorities know and what is not known and what information if forthcoming.
  6. Build alliances and partnerships with those in the community who have public trust so that key information can be effectively distributed.

 

The World Health Organisation’s (2017) guidance also states that there is strong evidence that emergency risk communication should be integrated into all planning and have a key role in emergency leadership teams.

In terms of practice, it is clear from evidence that multiple methods of message distribution should be used across networks as part of an integrated strategy.

 

  • Risk should not be explained in technical terms, as this is not helpful for promoting risk mitigation behaviours.
  • Consistent messages should come from different information sources.
  • Messages should be released early in the outbreak.
  • Messages should promote specific actions people can realistically take to protect their health.
  • Messages need to arise from and be adapted to cultural contexts.

Messages need to be reviewed and reshaped periodically as the emergency evolves.