Update!
After a very nice little hiatus, I've decided to put pen to paper once again, such as it were. I'm still posting on public health preparedness issues, though obviously I'll be focusing on H1N1 influenza pretty exclusively. I've noticed that I've been writing about public information a lot, and I continue to have a huge interest in social media in both of these realms.
If you've got an interest in any of this please feel free to leave me a comment, drop me an email or follow me on Twitter
Lately, my feed reader has been buzzing with the stylings of a new-to-me blogger. Hailing from Oakville, Ontario, Canada, Patrice Cloutier’s blog, Crisis Comms Command Post, has been doing some really interesting work on crisis communications blogging.
His latest, Is it time to review how PIOs work and JIC structure?, looks at an idea about JICs that I’ve been toying with a lot lately. Specifically, what is the main function of JIC? Is it to coordinate media messaging? Or to massage and enhance the “common knowledge” of an event?
Being someone who has never sat in that traditional media coordination seat, I’ve never been a huge champion of the idea that writing press releases and setting up press conferences should be the main outcome of a JIC. I was always much more interested in the ability of a roomful of PIOs and PA folks finding and taking the prevailing interpretation of a situation and melding that to one that benefits the government agency (or private company) that is charged with the response; as opposed to the latter, where a roomful of PIOs and PA folks is responding to the media’s interpretation of a situation in which they happen to be responding.
This is a bit off the beaten public health preparedness track, but I’ve been focusing so much on crisis comms work lately that it seemed a natural time to pass this blog along to you all. If you’re really looking to loop this back to the conversation at hand, in a pandemic situation, say something like an outbreak of novel H1N1 influenza, what is the role of the PIO? Would a JIC be necessary or beneficial ? What would it do?
I’ve argued that a JIC would be a great idea for such a situation, if only to seek out an respond directly to rumors and half-truths that would dissuade people from taking adequate precautions to prevent the spread of the virus. Is that what your PIO is doing? Should they be?
In any case, check out Patrice’s work here.
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For Twitter fans, this last week has been one of discovery. Twitter rolled out the ability to group other Twitter accounts into lists, and then share those collected lists with the world. Seems pretty cool, but when gunfire rang out at Fort Hood, Twitter lists became an important, real-time news aggregator. This great article from social media blog Mashable, points out some of the best collected lists.
Better bloggers than me say that you need a catchy title to your posts – something that will stir conversation and get people’s dander up. I can’t imagine that this one won’t.
By now, I’m sure you’ve all heard about the latest. And if not, I’m sure it will hit the national press soon enough. Several large Wall Street firms have begun receiving H1N1 vaccine from NYC Department of Health and Mental Hygiene to distribute through their employee health units to high-risk employees. Apparently, BusinessWeek broke the story here.
Once that happened, hue and cry. A sternly worded letter from the former NYC Health Commissioner and current CDC Director, investigations are being called for, Senators are writing letters, the whole nine yards.
Rightly or wrongly, I think that NYC DOHMH, CDC and Wall Street are going to get raked over the coals for this. CDC and Wall Street can take care of themselves, but NYC DOHMH will probably come out of this the worst of the three, and they’re the ones least at fault, in my opinion.
Besides all that, I think that giving H1N1 vaccine to large employers with on-site healthcare infrastructure is not the part we should be upset about. In fact, I’m surprised that this hasn’t happened other places already, and I’m positive that it will happen again, and more times, across the country. Maybe not bankers next time, but maybe large manufacturers, etc.
Why?
Because public health departments have been charged with distributing hundreds of millions of courses of vaccine, and they can’t. They simply don’t have the infrastructure. Not enough manpower, not enough drivers, not enough cars, not enough refrigerators, not enough forms, not enough databases, not enough data entry folks, not enough vaccinators, not enough anything. And then along comes a company that says, we have 10,000 people working for us. Give us vaccine and we’ll take care of all of them and their families. Free of charge. Set it and forget it. Take your time and concentrate on the poor, the destitute, the infirm, the non-English speakers, the unemployed, the sick. That’s what public health departments do best anyway.
Boy, I’ll tell you how good that must look to an overworked overwhelmed public health department. And if New York City is doing it? If the best funded and best staffed health department in the country is doing this, I can assure you that other cities, counties and states are doing it.
So, let’s examine the real problem here. The real problem is the same problem that Trust for America’s Health yells about every November. It’s the same problem I’ve yelled about before. After thirty years of budget cuts, hiring freezes, matching grants, new spending only, supplement not replace, preparedness only, first on the chopping block, public health is little more than skin and bones. Public health departments can’t do their job on a normal day, let alone when 10 to 15% of the public is showing up at emergency rooms, vaccine is rolling in and out of the building all day every day, the media calls, the conference calls, the reporting requirements. Imagine all that. And then along comes a company that says, we have 10,000 employees people working for us…
What we’re witnessing is no more than the absolute failure of the United States public health system.
After decades of being stretched and chronically underfunded, after warnings that someday something’s gonna happen, after letting the infrastructure rot, it finally did happen. A real public health emergency. And the CDC and HHS said that it was a local matter, and we’ll give you all the vaccine you need—more even–, but you’ve got to handle all of the boots-on-the-ground stuff yourself. And the states and counties dusted off their panflu plans and diligently crafted public information messages, and scheduled flu shot clinics and told their surveillance guy to ramp it up for a bit until we get a handle on things. And then they found that none of our previously developed messages worked. And then they had to cancel all of their flu shot clinics cause they didn’t have any vacccine. And then the surveillance guy collapsed from working 12-hour days for 2 months straight. And when the vaccine finally showed up, they only got a third of what they were promised. And then the contract nurses they hired to help out didn’t show up to work and somebody had to cover for them. And then along comes a company that says, we have 10,000 employees people working for us…
In a perfect world, would I be appalled by this turn of events? That Wall Street got their flu shots first? Absolutely disgusted.
But this is far from a perfect world. And while the priority groups were set for a good reason, the fact of the matter is that folks in those priority groups have to catch the flu from somewhere, and I’ll bet that some of them catch it from bankers. Vaccinating everyone decreases the incidence of disease; it decreases the chances that that pregnant woman, or that child, or that asthmatic, will catch the flu. And really, isn’t that the ultimate goal? To keep people from getting sick? When you’re fighting with one hand tied behind your back, do you question who it is that just gave you a baseball bat? No, you grab it and swing for the fences and hope for the best.
The valuable lesson we’ve all learned today? Underfunding public health is the same as undermining public safety. And not in some bioterrorism/emergency preparedness way. In a people get sick and die from a natural disease kind of way. In a traditional public health can, has, and will save lives kind of way.
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An interesting article about vaccine delays, and how that affects HHS' credibility during this campaign. I have some thoughts on this, and hopefully will find a chance to write them up.
