Communication and Crisis
HCS 320
7/29/2013
Dr. Clegg

Communication and Crisis My name is Brianna Rodriguez and I am the director of the regional emergency management office. We have begun to receive official reports of contaminated water with a life-threatening biological agent. As director, I have many priorities in getting this situation under control, but most importantly will need to be in communication with all the organizations involved. Putting our crisis plan into immediate effect will hopefully keep everything organized. The ultimate goal will be to get the information out to the public with a plan, swiftly but making sure not to create panic along the way. A quick response is very important in a crisis situation. In
Firstly, you must anticipate a crisis. If you do not think that anything will ever happen, you will never be prepared. Then you need to assign a communications team and appoint a spokesperson. It is important to pick one person that will take care of giving statements to ensure that not everyone is speaking about the issue and possibly relaying incorrect information. Once you have at team in place, establishing notification and monitoring systems would be the next step. For example, Google alerts, a low cost way to send out notifications. The final steps would be to identify stakeholders and develop statements. Community partnerships would come in handy at this time; we will need to utilize all of our resources. Also, statements are necessary for your spokesperson, so that they will know exactly what information to relay to the public. To improve the communication strategies within our crisis, we must incorporate most of these steps (Bernstein, 2013). It will also be the responsibility of my crisis team to inform, educate and entrust the people about health issues during a crisis. This information will need to be given to law enforcement agencies and all others responsible for the care of the public. Open lines of communication will help make sure there is no miscommunication. Using the communication team we have assembled, it would be a good idea to plan and get all the information together for release to the public. This is a good way to