Pandemic Communications Toolkit

Crisis emergency risk communication (CERC) is the application of evidence-based principles to effectively communicate during emergencies. CERC framework is applied in public health in response to health emergencies, like the COVID-19 pandemic to encourage public participation in disease prevention and containment. Effective application of CERC framework depends, in part, on reaching populations with a history of social injustice, health disparities, and limited access to health information. These vulnerable populations and minority groups are more likely to have communication gaps due to socioeconomic disadvantage, low health literacy, immigration status, and limited English proficiency, compounded by language and cultural discordance.

Community-engaged research (CEnR) partnerships are uniquely positioned to operationalize pandemic risk communication frameworks among vulnerable populations. Community-engaged CERC has the potential to reduce COVID-19 disparities through shared creation and dissemination of public health messages, enhanced connection to existing resources, and incorporation of community voices in regional pandemic mitigation policies.

RHCP developed, implemented, and tested a community-engaged COVID-19 CERC framework, through which thousands of people in the Rochester and surrounding areas were reached with accurate and timely information on COVID-19 prevention, containment and vaccination. This framework, which included bi-directional communication through communication leaders, was adapted by other partnerships in a variety of demographic and geographic contexts. RHCP is collaborating with other community-engaged partnerships that used the RHCP CERC framework to create a pandemic communications toolkit.

The goal of this work is to harness the experiences of the communication leaders and others who used the RHCP CERC framework, to develop an actionable toolkit of community-engaged CERC that can be adapted for the current and future pandemics in diverse contexts. This toolkit, as well as a freely available culturally tailored pandemic message library with message maps and message content may be adapted for future use, will be freely available for use by health departments, community organizations and community-engaged partnerships during future infectious disease outbreaks and other public health related emergencies.