Improving Public Health: Communication Plan Assessment and Best Practices

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).