JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

Background:

Governments and public health agencies worldwide experienced difficulties with social media-mediated infodemics on the Internet during the COVID-19 pandemic. Existing public health crisis communication strategies need to be updated. However, there is a lack of systematic compilation of crisis communication experiences of governments and public health agencies worldwide during the COVID-19 pandemic, necessitating the update of crisis communication strategies.

Objective:

This systematic review aims to collect and organize the experiences of senders (i.e., governments and public health agencies) on crisis communication during the COVID-19 pandemic. Our specific interest is to explore the difficulties that governments and public health agencies experienced, challenges that should be overcome in future public health crises, and best practices of crisis communication of governments and public health agencies during the COVID-19 pandemic in times of infodemic.

Methods:

The search will be conducted in MEDLINE, CINAHL, PsycINFO, PsycARTICLES, Web of Science, and Google Scholar. We seek to include qualitative studies on crisis communication of governments and public health agencies (e.g., officials, staffs, health professionals, researchers) to the public. Quantitative studies with quantitative data will be excluded. Only papers written in English will be included. Data on study characteristics, study aim, participant characteristics, methodology, theoretical framework, object of crisis communication, and key results will be extracted. The methodological quality of eligible studies will be assessed using the Joanna Briggs Institute (JBI) critical appraisal checklist for qualitative research. Two independent reviewers will share responsibility for screening of publications, data extraction, and quality assessment. If there is disagreement, it will be resolved through discussion and the third reviewer will be consulted, if necessary.

Results:

We will summarize the findings in a table and a conceptual diagram and synthesize in a descriptive and narrative review. We expect the results of this review to be submitted for publication by the end of 2024.

Conclusions:

To our knowledge, this will be the first systematic review to provide the experiences of governments and public health agencies on their crisis communication to the public during the COVID-19 pandemic. This review will contribute to the future improvement of the guidelines for crisis communication of governments and public health agencies to the public.