ROLE OF COMMUNICATION

Role Of Communication

Role Of Communication

Introduction

Strategic planning is an organization's process of defining its strategy, or direction, and making decisions on allocating its resources to pursue this strategy, including its capital and people. Various business analysis techniques can be used in strategic planning, including SWOT analysis (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats ), PEST analysis (Political, Economic, Social, and Technological), STEER analysis (Socio-cultural, Technological, Economic, Ecological, and Regulatory factors), and EPISTEL (Environment, Political, Informatic, Social, Technological, Economic and Legal).

FDA has seen its responsibilities increase exponentially in recent years as globalization, emerging areas of science, evolving technologies, and people's growing interest in managing their health and well-being have presented the agency with unprecedented challenges and opportunities. These factors have enormous implications for the ways in which the agency communicates the risks and benefits of the products it regulates.( Hamburg, 2009)

In the past, FDA's communication efforts were largely restricted to overseeing the key vehicle for communicating risk information to the public—the labeling of FDA-regulated products. The process of negotiating with product manufacturers about changes to labeling or decisions to recall a product was often lengthy. But as the Internet and emerging technologies have both enabled and fed the public's demand for greater transparency and communication frequency, these protracted waiting periods have given way to communication in real time. Thus, designing a contemporary risk communication strategy is key to FDA's efforts to reposition itself to realize its potential for effective protection and promotion of health, enabled by 21st century knowledge and technology.( Day, 2006)

Discussion

In the past decades, FDA's awareness has grown about the breadth of what constitutes risk communication. This is consistent with the general growth in acceptance of risk communication as a broader process than one-way messaging about risks from experts to non-experts.6 Risk communication that seeks to be effective needs to consider processes and procedures in addition to content. In pursuit of a shared acknowledgment of how FDA conceptualizes risk communication, a cross-FDA group of staff involved in communications agreed on the below working definition of FDA risk communication.( Ajzen, 1991)

In the context of FDA's responsibilities, its risk communication activities fall into two broad categories. The first relates to FDA's function as an information-generator. In this capacity, FDA produces and disseminates its own information about regulated products to the press and various stakeholders, including consumers, medical professionals (e.g., physicians, nurses, physician assistants, pharmacists, veterinarians, hospital administrators, and health plan ...