Research Comms Podcast: What lessons can we learn from the Covid pandemic about how to communicate public health during a time of crisis?
‘Recommendations that we make are going to be tentative. They're going to be based on what we know today. And as a result they could change tomorrow.’ Glen Nowak, on the need for transparent communications during rapidly evolving public health crises.
Glen Nowak spent 14 years working at the Center for Disease Control (CDC) where he was director of media relations and director of communications for its National Immunization Program. Today he is a professor of advertising and public relations at Grady College, where he also manages their new Center for Health and Risk Communication.
In this episode of Research Comms, Glen talks about the core concepts that underpin crisis communication, the importance of documenting research during crises, the special challenges of a virus with unexpected longevity and messaging around the unknowns.
SUBSCRIBE ON
or wherever you listen to your podcasts…
The below is a short excerpt. For the full interview download the podcast.
In communications terms, what is the biggest challenge related to a public health crisis or investigation?
A crisis brings a lot of demands for information. One of the things that often surprises the experts, the scientists, the doctors, the epidemiologists is, how many questions arise and how many questions they need to provide answers to.
People want to know: How bad is something going to get? What's the worst case scenario? What's the best case scenario? What should I do to protect myself and my family? How worried should I be? How concerned should I be? And so one of the first things that happens is there's a lot of demand on experts for what can we tell people.
We also have to, as communications people, ask experts: What are you going to do going forward? How are you going to learn the answers to the questions people are interested in having answers to? In terms of getting information that will inform your policies, what is your timeline to get that information?
It's very important. People say transparency is critical. But transparency really means giving people timely information about what the situation is, what they should do, what you don't know and what you're trying to do to learn the things that you don't know.
Have you listened to these other episodes of the Research Comms podcast?
One of the core concepts in your field manual for epidemiology is that the actions and behaviour of those providing leadership matter. Can you explain this further?
I think what often happens is people who are putting forward messages, particularly elected officials, fail to realize that behaviors and actions communicate, they often speak louder than words, and you really need to have an alignment between the advice that you're giving and the people who are giving advice.
Early on in my career at CDC there was a lot of interest in trying to increase influenza vaccines. One of the things that people would tell us was that they looked to their doctor or the person who was involved in giving vaccinations for guidance and expertise.
Some of them would say “I asked my doctor and my doctor said ‘I recommend it, but I don't do it myself’”. And at that point, the person said, “Well, if you don't do it, I'm not interested in doing it because you must know something that I don't know. Because otherwise it seems like you would do the action that you're recommending.”
So it really is essential that the people, whether they're experts or elected officials who are providing guidance in a crisis, are willing and able to model and do the advice that they are giving.
We're into year three of the pandemic. How good a job do you think public health authorities like the CDC and the world health organisation have done at following these core concepts?
I think probably all of them have been inconsistent in following their own rules. I was director of media relations at the CDC in the 2009 H1N1 pandemic, and one of the things that we did very explicitly at one of the very first press briefings for journalists was we spent some time trying to get ahead of some things. We told the journalists - and we hoped that they would convey to the public - that at the beginning of a crisis, there's a lot that you don't know. And as a result, we're going to be quickly learning new things every day.
That means that the recommendations are going to be tentative. They're going to be interim. They're going to be based on what we know today. And as a result they could change tomorrow. We told journalists very early on, ‘don't be surprised when things change quickly and unexpectedly because that's what happens when you’re having to respond to a virus, viruses change quickly and unexpectedly.’
We told journalists and the public, ‘don't be surprised if you see different countries responding differently. There's many good reasons for that. One is that the virus is playing out differently at different times and different places. So you shouldn't expect kind of a uniform response everywhere at the same time. It's also beneficial because you can learn from different actions that are being taken in different places.’
You have to remember the reason you're learning is because you're dealing with a novel, brand new virus, something you have very little experience with.
So it can be very beneficial for places to take different approaches. That said, it also is really important that the successes, the effectiveness or ineffectiveness of those different approaches is documented. In other words, you need to be doing formal research while you're doing it. Otherwise you're left with trying to gauge the success through anecdotes and stories. You really need higher quality data, even as a communications researcher.
What's unique here is there's nothing else in our lifetimes that we can compare this to in terms of the communications and policy responses. This has gone on longer than many people ever envisioned a pandemic would in terms of how it's playing out. I was involved in many training exercises at CDC, they all involved influenza. None of them involve a coronavirus and they all typically assumed that the pandemic would last 12 to 18 months and then we would be right back to where we were pre-pandemic.
So I think one of the things that WHO, the CDC and others have really struggled with is the length of this and how much attention and effort it requires to do communications. Because there isn't going to be a one message that gets you through three years. There's going to be a need for probably new messages every single day. And that takes a lot of work.
I want to talk about the phrase ‘Follow the science’ and how that communications message can be so misleading because it sort of suggests that science is this unified, monolithic thing that everybody agrees with. What do you think of that use of that slogan?
I think it's a bad slogan. Often, when it comes to slogans or framing things, the people who come up with the slogan assume that everybody is going to interpret it the same way. I think the assumption was that ‘follow the science’ was going to be interpreted along the lines of ‘use the best available evidence and data that you have to make your policy decisions’.
That should be done. That's really what we want to do. But that's how you need to say it: ‘we're using the best available evidence and data that we have right now to inform our decision.’
‘Follow the science’ introduces too many problems because first of all, what science are you referring to?
As you saw with the pandemic very early on, there wasn't any science really, at least not direct science. There was science that could be kind of indirectly applied, but that's not what people think when they hear that phrase.
Research Comms is presented by Peter Barker, director of Orinoco Communications, a digital communications and content creation agency that specialises in helping to communicate research. Find out how we’ve helped research organisations like yours by taking a look at past projects…
EXPLORE MORE FROM THE ORINOCO COMMS BLOG
