Communicating with the public during an emergency
With the announcement in the past few hours that there are potentially cases of swine flu in New Zealand, the media has mentioned that both the Ministries of Health and Foreign Affairs and Trade have been monitoring and providing advice on the situation. However, if you visit their websites there is no obvious and easy link to take you to a page for more information. Although to give MFAT some credit, if you follow the safetravel.govt.nz link, you will find more information there.
Given the current heightened interest being shown in swine flu, it is a pity that both of these agencies aren’t providing clearly visible links on both of their home pages to locations where more information can be obtained.
Update: 2009-04-27 13:57 Great to see that the Ministry of Health now has a lovely big banner across the front of their website with a link to further information. Now they just need to implement an RSS feed so that interest parties can subscribe to receive all updates in a feed reader.
The link will take people to the MOH Mexican Swine Influenza Updates page.