Communication Tools

Pandemics can cause tremendous communication challenges in healthcare and beyond. Pre-planning all healthcare communications can prove beneficial during circumstances such as outbreaks or pandemics, but it can be labor intensive. Below are several important resources that will aid your healthcare team with preparing for difficult conversations, communicating outbreaks and pandemics to patients and families, and also professionally interacting with news media.

Even the best trained infection prevention and risk management professionals face a daunting task when discussing a healthcare outbreak with either internal or external stakeholders. This toolkit is the premier source on talking to patients, families, and external stakeholders such as the media about outbreaks within healthcare settings.

Contact Tracing is a critical element of public health and healthcare epidemiology. It’s also critical in stopping infectious disease transmission. While Contact Tracing may be labor intensive, the process is useful to both healthcare and public health professionals, especially during pandemics such as COVID-19. This CDC toolkit provides a helpful overview of the proper steps to conducting contact tracing.

CDC’s CERC program provides trainings, tools, and resources to help health communicators, emergency responders, and leaders of organizations communicate effectively during emergencies. This program can be used as a standalone for internal staff training, but also as a model curriculum for learning best practices in healthcare communication during pandemics, outbreaks, or other serious adverse events.