Information Exchange: Projects

The goal of the risk communication task of the LaSER project is to develop and test critical communication strategies and plans for community public health preparedness, response, and mitigation of event consequences before, during and after a large scale, urban terrorist event. This work will coordinate with and support other work included within the LaSER Public Health Project.

Understanding risk communication principles is critical for responsive leadership in times of crisis, and will enable the building of effective capacity to reduce the consequences of terrorism. Under crisis conditions, communication should be planned based upon consideration of message content, the characteristics of message senders and recipients, and the technology being used to convey messages to minimize delay in involving the correct personnel and utilizing the correct responses. The nature of these factors differs for pre-disaster, during disaster and post-disaster conditions. These dimensions will be incorporated into the risk communication task for emergency readiness for a large scale attack that is part of the CCPR LaSER project, initially targeted to a large scale, biological, chemical or nuclear terrorist act in the New York City Region, but scalable to other U.S. cities. An interdisciplinary approach is adopted drawing on social psychology, communication technology, and risk communication directly applied to health threats associated with disasters.