It’s the nature of pandemics… dealing with the unknown, on the fly, moving with the changing scenarios, making sure advice is accurate, robust, and up to date.
The State Services Commission (SSC) has a role in leading the Public Service and wider State sector during a pandemic. Our responsibilities are to provide advice on employment relations and help ensure that the Public Service and other essential services are able to keep delivering necessary services to the public.
So how has the SSC dealt with this? And how well have we done?
The last time the State Services faced a global pandemic was when bird flu came on the scene in 2004.
Since Novel A H1N1 09 virus infection (swine flu) reared its head the process has gone something like this:
- Dig out SSC Pandemic guidelines for bird flu on the website. Take calls from agencies that need employment relations information updated now. Aim to make it simpler, easier to understand, more logical and ‘step by step’, and give outlines and share the principles rather than the details.
- Take advice from the Ministry of Health, as the lead agency, and remove all health related information from our website. Because of the rapidly changing nature of the pandemic, channel all health related questions to the Ministry of Health website to ensure consistent health advice under constantly changing conditions.
- Take advice from the Crown Law office to ensure the legal rights of both public sector employers, and their employees, are considered and included.
- Liaise with the Department of Labour to ensure SSC advice and Department of Labour advice dovetail in to each other
- Informed the Minister of State Services, who -happily- is also the Minister of Health, about the advice.
- We continue to advise, work with and support agencies. We are committed to ensure a smooth flow of information as the scenario changes and advice is updated.
So how have we done? Please let us know what you think about SSC’s updated pandemic planning advice and any questions you have. And feel free to pass this on to anyone else you think would be interested in the topic.
2 Comments
For a true whole-of-government information resource to pandemics, it would be much easier to have a single website that contains all the info, rather than having to trawl around multiple agencies websites and follow the link trails and have to browse different sites with different forms of navigation. I contacted the previous Minister of Health a few years ago suggesting the a single-stop website was created to bring together all pandemic information within government. At least they have now registered pandemic.govt.nz and forwarded it to the MOH page, but we’re still a long way from integrating all govt information on pandemic in one easily accessible place.
There still needs to be a whole-of-govt RSS feed that any govt agency that produces a new document/page can add to the feed. Or is this something that perhaps we citizens need to do because our govt agencies aren’t up to the challenge?
As an emergency manager, I might be tempted to have a look at the advice when I get back to the office.
Gavin,
I think you are right to identify that a single view of pandemic information from government would be useful. However, my view is that creating a new centralised, static site within a large distributed system (that is, government) brings major challenges. Some of these include governance, administration, promotion, timeliness and maintenance of the information coming from multiple agencies and the almost inevitable stagnation.
I believe we are making progress towards better, more dynamic solutions.
Firstly, there *is* an all of government feed (including local government): http://search.newzealand.govt.nz/rss (hosted by http://newzealand.govt.nz). This is an aggregated content stream that over 60 agencies contribute to.
Based on this (and other content gathering) http://newzealand.govt.nz is doing a solid job of acting as a lens to all-of-government pandemic information. On the home page, you will notice that the “Popular Searches” cloud features both pandemic and swine flu based on search volume.
Clicking on (or searching for) “pandemic” gives a page with content spotlights and other content from multiple agencies including Ministry of Health, Ministry of Education, Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Treasury and Department of Labour. Page 2 even references nzhistory.net.nz regarding the 1918 pandemic. In the left pane, you see an Explorer giving access to further resources grouped by agency or topic.
Go to http://search.newzealand.govt.nz/search?query=pandemic
The dynamic, near real-time nature of this information gives a very good view of what is available across government.
There are other views too, such as a Google search filtered to the .govt.nz domain:
http://www.google.co.nz/search?hl=en&q=site%3A*.govt.nz+pandemic
There is work going on to guide agencies on how to publish in a way that contributes to this type of dynamic solution (which could equally be built by 3rd parties). I’ll post separately on that next week, but for a teaser go to http://research.elabs.govt.nz/new-zealand-government-feed-standard-2009/