COMMUNICATION RISK
Communication of risk
- Very poor public grasp of risk and risk statistics
- Confusion between relative / absolute / reference / attributable risk
- Variable perception / tolerance of different kinds of risk
- Fantasy of a "safe drug"
Perception of risk
Factors increasing intolerance;
- Involuntary - e.g. exposure to pollution rather than voluntary, such as smoking or playing dangerous sports
- Unfairly distributed - some benefit whilst other suffer
- Inescapable - cannot be avoided by one's personal actions
- Unfamiliar - arising from a novel source
- Man - made - from other than natural sources...
- Hidden / irreversible - e.g. effects damaging but concealed for years
- Affects posterity - threatens children, births or future generations
- Particulary dreadful - e.g. distressing symptoms or social rejection
- Victims identifable - e.g. a particular blood type or social group
- Scientifically obscure - new or rare
- Contradicted - argued by responsible sources
Problematic issues in drug safety
- Adverse effects
- Risk as a concept in medicine
- Benefit-harm
- Effectiveness-risk
- Public health versus profit
- Access to medicines
- Individual patient variation and susceptibility
- Polypharmacy
- Relationship of allopathic and traditional medicines
- Resistance
- Diagnostic errors
- Prescribing errors
- Compliance issues
Risk Factors for Government Officials
- Political expediency
- Culture of secrecy
- Accountability
- Bureaucracy and inertia
- Hierarchy
- Process versus performance
- Complexity
- Workload
- Corruption
Summary
Topics covered;
- The nature of crisis
- Crisis management model
- Planning
- Risk assessment
- Risk management
- Crisis communications
- Learning from experience
