Leadership in Strategic Health Communication: Making a Difference in Infectious Diseases and Reproductive Health

"If a communicable disease outbreak is imminent and communication plans are not already in place, public health authorities must plan and implement communication quickly - perhaps in days rather than months. This manual is meant to help in such a situation."

This resource offers an integrated approach to learning health communication, presenting a guide for a workshop via classroom presentations, discussions, and the SCOPE (Strategic Communication Planning and Evaluation) interactive software programme - all of which are designed to enhance communication skills. The workshop sessions are based on the P Process, a 6-step communication framework that involves: analysis, strategy development, creative approaches and materials development, implementation, monitoring and evaluation, and lessons learned and replanning.

The manual focuses on the topic of emergency preparedness - specifically, on H1N1. "Not all the countries in this workshop have a priority interest on HIV or reproductive health but H1N1 is a concern for all. While we focus on this topic, please note that the planning process or approach would be similar for addressing other health issues." For instance, a portion of the resource looks to the "safe motherhood" initiative to explain the potential power of the action-learning approach ("a continuing, iterative process with various groupings of stakeholders") that is outlined in this resource. Figure 3 on page 16 illustrates "a fundamental redesign of the maternal health production system....[which] transforms the system by changing the traditional hierarchical relationships....In this redesigned system, there will be many areas where new kinds of data are needed to generate new understandings about the current realities in order to improve the system's performance....[For instance, w]ith the active involvement of household and communities, every maternal death and morbidity can be identified and the true (cultural, social, economic) causes can be understood on a continuing basis. This provides the basis for learning deeply about the household and community needs, particularly relating to the non-material resources and the values constraining better outcomes. The program managers can concurrently learn how to work with communities in their specific cultural context to develop program outputs that will acceptably introduce new values, practices, knowledge and skills as well as technologies and services to improve their resourcefulness and in the production of health..."

The manual contains the basic information presented in each session of the course; it is designed to be a reference guide during the workshop and a tool to help practitioners apply workshop lessons. It starts with an introductory paper on strategic leadership applied to the public health issues of population and reproductive health. The hope is that these initial thoughts might encourage discussions on the better use of leadership and management principles to increase the effectiveness of communication interventions. Next, the manual includes:

1. Seven worksheets, which can serve as stand-alone, easy-to-use guides to planning and implementation. According to the publisher, completing all the worksheets in order can generate a comprehensive strategic communication plan.
2. The Worksheets Guide, which is designed to help those with limited background in health communication understand and complete the worksheets. The guide consists of an intro and six chapters, each covering a step in the process of planning a health communication intervention using the P Process framework.
3. The reference area, which includes current information and technical guidelines for responding to emerging and re-emerging communicable diseases.