Back to Annual Meeting

Back to Annual Meeting

APHA Scientific Session and Event Listing

Brenda Seals, PhD, MPH¹, Sarah B. Bass, PhD, MPH¹, Dominique G. Ruggieri, MA¹, and Amy Cunningham². (1) Department of Public Health, Temple University, 1700 N. Broad St., Room 304, Philadelphia, PA 19122, (215) 204-6780, brenda.seals@temple.edu, (2) Public Health, Temple University, 1700 N. Broad, #304, Philadelphia, PA 19122

Communications in the midst of a public health responses to disease outbreaks, emergencies and other health messages depend on 1-800 call centers to answer questions from the public. For regional or local issues, 1-800 call centers may be ill equipped to effectively respond to periodic floods of calls about health concerns. Such call centers may be linked to city or county phone banks more accustomed to answering questions from tourists, than in responding to emergency conditions or tragedies such as meningitis outbreaks. Yet, beyond developing information materials such as Fact Sheets and Question and Answer Sheets, little exists in the form of training for 1-800 call centers and no evaluations to date were identified that looked at the effectiveness of any training for call center staff. This project summarizes research relevant to 1-800 call centers and reports a content analysis of communications materials available to 1-800 call centers. On the basis of identified gaps, this abstract also describes the development of new materials for building skills of phone bank staff. Very few studies were identified that had any evaluation of 1-800 numbers in terms of effectiveness. The analysis of sample call center scripts revealed that materials were organized in ways that would be difficult to implement in times of crises and that the target audience may need more training to answer questions coming from the training than is currently offered. Public Health emergency response efforts need to address this gap by building training programs and implementing them nationally.

Learning Objectives:

• Describe state of the art resources and evaluation of 1-800 number communications.
• Identify gaps to address to improve public health emergency communications with 1-800 number call centers.
• Discuss the development of new materials for 1-800 number call centers.

Keywords: Disasters, Health Education Strategies

Presenting author's disclosure statement:

Not Answered