How to get experts to agree quickly in a public health emergency: the TRICE method

What is it about?

Public health emergencies demand rapid expert guidance, but divergent expert opinions and mixed messaging can erode public trust and undermine efforts to change health behaviours. This paper describes the development and testing of TRICE (Template for Rapid Iterative Consensus of Experts), a structured method for generating psychologically-informed expert guidance quickly, with built-in peer review and consensus processes. TRICE was developed and piloted by the British Psychological Society's COVID-19 Behavioural Science and Disease Prevention Taskforce, a group of 15 core members drawn from across health psychology, social psychology and public health. The paper reports how the method was used to produce 18 peer-reviewed guidance documents and four rapid systematic reviews during the COVID-19 pandemic, with a median of 18 experts involved per document and a median of seven drafts per output. The process documents show how expert consensus was iteratively built and how the method balances speed of production with scientific rigour.

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Why is it important?

The COVID-19 pandemic exposed a critical gap in the public health infrastructure: no established method existed for rapidly translating behavioural science expertise into credible, consensual guidance at pace. Disagreements between experts, played out publicly, could actively damage public confidence in official recommendations at moments when consistent messaging was essential to protecting lives. TRICE fills that gap with a replicable, transparent method that can be applied in future public health emergencies, and the paper provides a practical template others can adopt. Its development and successful deployment during one of the largest global public health crises in living memory means the methodology has already been tested under real-world conditions, giving it immediate credibility and transferability for future emergency preparedness planning.