Description:
The National Emergency Preparedness Platform is an official source of information in Romania to help citizens better understand risks, and to inform people about prevention measures and behaviour in various emergencies or disasters. The platform is based on a website called Fiipregatit.ro to convey the information to citizens. The aim of this platform is to provide extensive information to the population regarding various types of risks. The information is provided based on multiple guidelines with the same structure. The guides relate to various types of risks and the action to be undertaken before, during and after the crisis. During the COVID-19 pandemic, a series of guides, such as state of emergency, state of alert, symptoms, isolation, vaccination, travel, shopping, general recommendation and others were uploaded on the website. This solution was also used as a tool to counter disinformation campaigns about COVID-19. One example was the lack of trust of the population in the protective measures. To counter this, Romanian authorities uploaded a guide with myths, questions and answers that was accessed by large parts of the population, and contributed to less confusion. One limitation with this solution is that the server that hosts the platform may go down on various occasions for a limited period of time, due to for example maintenance services, information update, and overloaded web servers.
The solution could help to address the following needs of first responders and authorities:
Improve preparedness level among citizens
Communicate with or alert citizens