STAMINA project partners have delivered the report, D5.2 Guidelines on risk communication principles implementation., in line with fulfilling STAMINA project outcomes.
The D5.2 report contains an analysis of the factors, elements, structure and agents involved in communication in risk situations within an organisation. It also includes a series of examples of communication in risk situations from academic literature that serve to highlight good practices and practices to be avoided. The report presents an overview of the procedures commonly used by organisations, and some quotations about practical communication situations derived from the COVID-19 pandemic and other risk situations. By establishing a series of guidelines on risk communication principles, the report provides useful material for stakeholders from the pandemic management community to implement communication strategies during pandemic situations. In addition, these guidelines can be considered both for the improvement of the STAMINA solutions and for the development of the project trials.
This report is a key piece for partners, stakeholders and interested organisations to know the state of the art on communication in pandemic situations. The purpose is to review the possible gaps in risk communication between the public and organisations that are unique to pandemics, explore various media and practices for risk communication, and propose a series of guidelines to improve the implementation of this type of communication. Firstly, the report offers a review of the concept of risk communication, the goals and different modes of media implementation and public engagement. Subsequent sections detail the risk detection process and its classification. We focus on risks that may or may not belong to the communication process but are relevant to it. Subsequently, the report contains general practices often encountered around the organisation of the personnel tasked with communicating in pandemic situations, the design of the response processes and related materials, and their appropriate dissemination in different channels. Discussions around the effectiveness of these processes are also included. Finally, the report includes a set of guidelines and good practices based on both the literature and the experience of the organisations involved in the project.
In this set of guidelines, emphasis is placed on the main concerns of organisations in the current context, distributed in the following categories:
- General best practices from previous pandemics
- Effective communication on different media platforms
- Vulnerable community-specific lessons learned
- Effective listening/dialogue
- Tackling misinformation
- Building trust
The challenges are enormous and the context of the latest COVID-19 pandemic has raised both new ways of approaching risk communication with the public and the need for innovative tools to help the personnel involved in it. It also demonstrated viscerally the consequences of getting risk communication wrong. Working in light of these lessons, this report includes a section defining some points where the project tools can be useful for better understanding risk communication needs and effects, and some priority lines of work for the future.
Please download and read the full report here: https://stamina-project.eu/deliverables/