Leask Julie, Hooker Claire
Susan Wakil School of Nursing and Midwifery, Faculty of Medicine and Health, University of Sydney, NSW, Australia;
Sydney Health Ethics, Faculty of Medicine and Health, University of Sydney, NSW, Australia.
Public Health Res Pract. 2020 Jun 30;30(2):3022007. doi: 10.17061/phrp3022007.
Although there has been consistent evidence indicating that school closures have only limited efficacy in reducing community transmission of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), the question of whether children should be kept home from school has attracted extensive and often divisive public debate in Australia. In this article we analyse the factors that drove high levels of concern among parents, teachers and the public and led to both demands for school closures in late March 2020, and to many parents' reluctance to return their children to school in May 2020. We discuss how the use of well-established principles of risk communication might have reduced much of this community concern. Then we set out a range of practical suggestions for communication practices that build trust and hence diminish concerns in relation to managing schools over the long term of the COVID-19 pandemic.
尽管一直有证据表明，学校停课在减少2019冠状病毒病（COVID-19）社区传播方面效果有限，但在澳大利亚，儿童是否应该居家上学的问题引发了广泛且往往存在分歧的公众辩论。在本文中，我们分析了导致家长、教师和公众高度关注的因素，这些因素既引发了在2020年3月底要求学校停课的呼声，也导致许多家长在2020年5月不愿送孩子返校。我们讨论了如何运用成熟的风险沟通原则来减少社区的大部分担忧。然后，我们针对沟通实践提出了一系列切实可行的建议，这些沟通实践能够建立信任，从而减少在COVID-19大流行长期管理学校方面的担忧。
