Assessing the impact of vulnerability on perceptions of social cohesion in the context of community resilience to disaster in the Blue Mountains

Community Resilience After Hurricanes: Can Neuman's Systems Theory Guide Public Health Nursing?

Objective: Examination of community resilience after Hurricane Harvey and -applicability of Neuman's systems model to the role of public health nurses in applying primary, secondary, and tertiary prevention strategies to communities susceptible to natural disasters. Design: Descriptive, exploratory study. Sample: A convenience sample (N = 1,470). Measurements: Hurricane Harvey Survey. Results: Respondents from seven counties in southeast Texas report previously experiencing a hurricane (80%) with no weather-related flooding (79%), adequate preparation (54%), failure to comprehend the potential severity of Hurricane Harvey (62%), damage to their homes (45%), and a 68% loss of personal belongings. Anxiety, frustration, disbelief, determination, and hopefulness were rated highest after the storm. Residents received updates from family and friends, social media, and online news reports regarding rising water, even though, in many cases, a mandatory evacuation was not officially announced. Only 35% of respondents reported being aware of resources available, possibly due to flooding or inaccessibility of typical resources (e.g., hospitals, shelters). Communicating through social networks (social media, family, and friends) provided avenues for arranging evacuations and assistance. Respondents report giving assistance to others and receiving assistance from family, friends, and their faith community. The majority of respondents reported that the community provided adequate services during the hurricane (59%), and they plan to stay in southeast Texas (70%). Conclusions: Southeast Texas residents demonstrated individual and community resilience which may be further supported with primary, secondary, and tertiary nursing interventions as illustrated by Neuman's systems model. The rise in positive emotional response traits demonstrates positive coping, which is consistent with resilience. Effective and timely communication through social networks provides an additional line of resistance to protect and promote the resilience of the community. The lack of medical resources indicates a break in the normal line of defense and an area for potential improvement with the utilization of mobile medical units to provide healthcare for areas not easily accessible during a disaster. Public health nurses are strategically positioned in the international community to lead prevention and recovery efforts by applying theory-based community interventions.

Mental health and well-being impacts of COVID-19 on rural paramedics, police, community nurses and child protection workers

OBJECTIVE

To investigate the impact of COVID-19 on the mental health and well-being of rural paramedics, police, community nursing and child protection staff.

METHOD

An online survey was distributed to investigate the sources of stress and support across individual, task and organisational domains.

SETTING AND PARTICIPANTS

The survey was completed by 1542 paramedics, police, community nurses and child protection workers from all states and territories of Australia. This study describes the data for the 632 rural participants.

MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES

The main measures of well-being were the Public Health Questionnaire (PHQ9), the Generalised Anxiety Disorder (GAD7), the Maslach Burnout Inventory (MBI), workplace engagement, intention to quit and COVID-19-related stress.

RESULTS

The mean depression and anxiety scores were 8.2 (PHQ9) and 6.8 (GAD7). This is 2-3 times that found in the general community. Over half (56.1%) of respondents showed high emotional exhaustion (burnout). The emotional exhaustion, depersonalisation and personal accomplishment mean scores were 28.5, 9.3 and 34.2, respectively. The strongest associations with burnout and psychological distress were workload, provision of practical support, training and organisational communication. A significant proportion of respondents were seriously considering quitting (27.4%) or looking for a new job with a different employer (28.5%) in the next 12 months.

CONCLUSIONS

COVID-19 has increased the workload and stress on rural front-line community staff. The major sources of stress were related to organisations' responses to COVID-19 and not COVID-19 per se. The data suggest the most effective mental health interventions are practical and preventive, such as firstly ensuring fair and reasonable workloads.

Guide for community leaders to meet the challenges of personal preparation in the event of a disaster

OBJECTIVE

In the aftermath of fires which swept through a regional community in 2013, community leaders were thrust, unprepared, into the disaster recovery arena. The objective of this research was to investigate the subsequent lived experience of these community leaders and, based on this information, develop a guide to meet the challenges for their personal preparation in the context of disaster.

DESIGN

Ethical approval for the overarching Community Connections project was provided by Charles Sturt University (H2014073). The project design was informed by an interpretivist paradigm and the methodology embraced participatory action research and thus engaged community members and leaders as research partners. This paper reports on the community leader component of the overarching project.

SETTING

Blue Mountains, New South Wales, Australia.

PARTICIPANTS

There were 7 interview participants in both 2014 and 2018; 5 participated in both years. Participants were either managers of a local non-government organisation, peak body, school, emergency service or large relief organisation with a local presence.

MAIN OUTCOME MEASURE

The development of a guide for the personal preparation of community leaders.

RESULTS

The stress of community leaders escalated after the disaster, resulting in a debilitating blurring of professional and personal boundaries, heightened demand on personal knowledge, networking relationships and communication strategies.

CONCLUSION

The guide is practical and far reaching; the researchers could not locate anything similar to guide community leaders in their personal planning and preparation for work in disaster recovery.

Twitter Use in Hurricane Isaac and Its Implications for Disaster Resilience

Disaster resilience is the capacity of a community to “bounce back” from disastrous events. Most studies rely on traditional data such as census data to study community resilience. With increasing use of social media, new data sources such as Twitter could be utilized to monitor human response during different phases of disasters to better understand resilience. An important research question is: Does Twitter use correlate with disaster resilience? Specifically, will communities with more disaster-related Twitter uses be more resilient to disasters, presumably because they have better situational awareness? The underlying issue is that if there are social and geographical disparities in Twitter use, how will such disparities affect communities’ resilience to disasters? This study examines the relationship between Twitter use and community resilience during Hurricane Isaac, which hit Louisiana and Mississippi in August 2012. First, we applied the resilience inference measurement (RIM) model to calculate the resilience indices of 146 affected counties. Second, we analyzed Twitter use and their sentiment patterns through the three phases of Hurricane Isaac—preparedness, response, and recovery. Third, we correlated Twitter use density and sentiment scores with the resilience scores and major social–environmental variables to test whether significant geographical and social disparities in Twitter use existed through the three phases of disaster management. Significant positive correlations were found between Twitter use density and resilience indicators, confirming that communities with higher resilience capacity, which are characterized by better social–environmental conditions, tend to have higher Twitter use. These results imply that Twitter use during disasters could be improved to increase the resilience of affected communities. On the other hand, no significant correlations were found between sentiment scores and resilience indicators, suggesting that further research on sentiment analysis may be needed.