IMPROVING CRISIS COMMUNICATION SKILLS IN HEALTH EMERGENCY MANAGEMENT

In any emergency situation, but especially in health emergency scenarios, rapid and effective responses are requested to maintain or to restore normal conditions and to allow the access of the affected population to the adequate health care. These responses are only possible if extensive preparedness planning programmes are in place and if communication tools and guidelines are available in advance for the all actors, especially health care managers, media and population in general. Thus it is important to promote training and capacity building solutions with the objective of developing professionals' skills in crisis communication and health emergency management. Considering the recent health emergency scenarios in Europe, strengthening crisis communication and management capacities in European health systems is a priority to allow a quick and efficient response to the crisis situation. Guarantying a continue exchange of information among health authorities, population and media, using different communication channels (such as social networks, blogs, online magazines and other web portals) is essential to manage an emergency in the most effective way. Thus, there is a relevant need to design and develop adapted training materials focusing on different professionals' competencies and including a special emphasis on how to use the new communication channels in an emergency situation. Aiming at setting up a common pattern of content in crisis communication and health emergency management a consortium of six partners from Portugal, Spain, Italy, Germany, Belgium and Denmark is developing an innovative training approach, to support health authorities to improve the cooperation with the others actors involved in health emergency management and crisis scenarios (normally the population and the media) with the final scope of developing training materials and a set of communication tools that will focus on how health authorities can improve the cooperation with the others actors involved in the emergency management in order to deal with the health emergencies/crisis in the best and quickest way