Improving Public Health: Communication Plan Assessment and Best Practices

This report assesses the communication plan used by County Health Department (CHD) for managing projects involving relief given to the victims of disease outbreaks. It identifies the strengths and weaknesses of the current plan and compares it with global best practices. Based on the analysis, recommendations are made for improving the communication strategies of CHD.

Improving Public Health
Informatics
Introduction
The County Health Department (CHD) provides relief to people in the cases of major disease
outbreaks. In such situations, the CHD team has to be proactive and should have good knowledge of
the incidences. Also, programs designed for responding to disaster situations must be evaluated
properly to see if they are effective such that based on this assessment, steps can be taken to
improve the system. This needs CHD to have a good informatics capability to assist in decision
making. Also, to be able to serve the community well, there would be a number of different agencies
taking part and there would also be different stakeholders who would be associated with the
project. In such a situation, it is essential that a smooth and effective communication plan is made to
accommodate the needs of the project. In this report, the current communication plan made by CHD
would be assessed for its effectiveness and would be compared with the global best practices. Based
on this comparison recommendations would be made for improvement of communication strategies
for CHD (Beringer & Kock, 2013).
Communication Plan Assessment
A communication plan has been made to create a flow of communication between different
stakeholders so that communication breakdown does not happen. The plan uses a collaborative
methodology which begins with analysis of business processes of the organization and is followed by
business process redesign and defining of the project requirements (Ponnappa, 2014). The plan
involves identification of requirements that are listed in a table. It includes key stakeholders, their
issues, key communication messages, communication methods, communication specifics, and timing
issues in the plan. The plan has identified all major stakeholders of the project including internal and
external stakeholders. These included sponsor, client, project team members, senior management,
employees, subcontractors, unions, suppliers, government agencies, news media and community
(William Dow & Taylor, 2010).
An effective plan has some essential elements and can be assessed on the basis of their presence of
absence of consideration in the plan. These include types of communication, frequency of
communication, priority, method of communication, responsibilities, monitoring plan, policy
defining acceptable communication forms, and other important elements like meeting dates, status
reports, and scope. The current plan defines the stakeholders, their communication methods,
timelines and even communication messages. However, it fails to identify methods of reporting and
the kinds of reports that have to be shared between the stakeholders (Mirza, 2017).
Although, the communication plan can serve as a guide for the team while communication with
stakeholders, it does give a comprehensive view of the communication. It has no monitoring
features defined nor a policy determines to suggest what actions should be taken in case there is a
communication failure (VISWANATHAN, 2012).

Project management communication best practices
The healthcare informatics and relief systems follow some best practices of project communication
worldwide. Exploring these best practices can help in identification of the gaps in the communication
planning and address them with appropriate recommendations. The identified practices include:
 Participants of team meetings are often informed about the agenda of the discussion so that
people can come prepared for the healthiest discussions on the action plan
 All the data related to project is stored in a central location which is accessible to all the
major project members (VISWANATHAN, 2012)
 Status reports are standardized for the projects and their frequencies of submissions are
predefined which helps in monitoring, streamlining, and keeping the team updated with the
latest on the project (Medford-Davis & Kapur, 2014)
 Governments remain proactive by keeping situational awareness such that whenever there
is a possibility of a disease striking a place, immediate action ca be taken without fail
 The advisory panels who can help in combating disease situations are consulted prior to the
government intervention so that the teams visiting for relief are prepared to deal with the
situation taking guidance from these panels
 Policy makers also keep on doing research on such projects to understand how projects are
manager by others in the world. This intelligence can help an organisation develop a sounder
plan for managing communication by involving best practices (Sell, 2017)
Conclusions and recommendations
This report was prepared to understand the effectiveness of the communication plan that is used by
County Health Department (CHD) for managing projects involving relief given to the victims of
disease outbreaks. The communication plan was assessed on the basis of essential elements that a
communication plan needs to have as per project communication literature. It was found that while
the project plan did have good consideration of the communication needs of internal and external
stakeholders of the project, it largely lacked in its capability to provide a comprehensive guidance
(Ponnappa, 2014). The elements that were found missing form the plan included reporting structure,
handling of communication failure, and monitoring of project progresds. Certain best practices used
in the similar projects worldwide were also identified such as creation of a central intelligence for
storing all project related data, proactive situational awareness, distribution of agenda before
meetings and so on. Based on this analysis, a comparison can be made to identify missing elements
in the current plan of CHD and some recommendations for improvement can be made. These
include:
 The company must develop a proper reporting procedure for the team and define who
should be preparing report, who should be reviewing it, what actions can be
recommendations based on review, when to report the red flags, and at what intervals these
reporting should happen.
 The company can have a system in place where all the major meetings use a proper
procedure and guideline for setting agenda, communicating it to the team, fixing up
meeting, noting the minutes and then creating an actionable plan. This would help the
company ensure effectiveness of the meetings
 The company can also have a policy statement defining the action plan that should be used if
there is a communication failure on the project

 A central data repository must be created that would gather all the intelligence related to
projects and serve as a guide for ongoing relief systems so that teams can perform at its
best.
References
Beringer, C. J., & Kock, A. D. (2013). Behavior of internal stakeholders in project portfolio
management and its impact on success. International Journal of Project Management, 31(6),
840-846.
Jainendrakumar, T. D. (2016). Project Stakeholder Management. PM World Journal, 5(5), 1-9.
Medford-Davis, L. N., & Kapur, G. B. (2014). Preparing for effective communications during disasters:
lessons from a World Health Organization quality improvement project. Int J Emerg Med., 7-
15.
Mirza, A. (2017). Communication Issues and Solutions for Project Implementation. Karachi, Pakistan:
PMI.
Ponnappa, G. (2014). Project Stakeholder Management.. roject Management Journal, 1-3.
Sell, T. K. (2017). When the Next Disease Strikes: How To Communicate (and How Not To). Health
Secur, 28–30.
VISWANATHAN, B. B. (2012). 10 Best practices to Effectively Communicate with the Project
Stakeholders. PMI.
William Dow, & Taylor, B. (2010). Project Management Communications Bible. John Wiley & Sons.