Prevention, Mitigation, and Preparedness and Community Resilience in Disaster Response

 In conducting the research, two mitigation strategies that I believe can do best are setting mitigation goals and mitigation actions. Mitigation goals entail setting long-term policies for managing hazard. It is the role of the planning team to understand the risk and create plans. In order to come up with the goals, they should create a problem statement, state the themes from the outreach findings, review the community goals to ensure consistency with the new goals and state the mitigation goals to the State's plan (Chandra, 2011). If the disaster actually occurred, the efficiency of the strategy would be achieved by asking a question like ‘what are the short-term and long-term outcomes that the community seek to accomplish? This question will help the planning team come up with goals that focus on minimizing hazards. They will not only create goals but they will also find the best ways to achieve those goals.

 The second strategy is the mitigation actions. This entails setting projects and identifying the activities and implementing the actions to minimize the hazards. For example, the planning team may create local plans, come up with structural projects, education programs, and response actions. After creating mitigation actions, it is important to implement the actions by using the existing mechanism such as community plans and policies. The implementation also means finding the responsible agencies, funding mechanisms, and available financial resources (Chandra, 2011). If the disaster actually occurred, it is important to ask a question like ‘who are the stakeholders? What actions should be taken to minimize the hazard?' By understanding the stakeholders and people responsible for managing the hazard and stating the specific actions will be easier to solve the problem.

 The best preparedness strategies are identifying the special needs population and use the community-based organization to prepare for the disaster. The first step in preparedness should be finding the at-risk populations. The efficiency of the strategy would be achieved by asking ‘who is at risk?'. This will help identify the specific group that is vulnerable and provide the necessary resources required for preparedness (Chandra, 2011).

The second preparedness strategy is joining hands with the relevant organizations. This entails creating an emergency plan and involving the community-based organizations to offer long-term care. In other words, the stakeholders should engage in operational readiness and this includes employing all-hazard approach and empowering the existing capacities (Chandra, 2011). This strategy would efficient if the responsible team member asks themselves ‘who the stakeholders are and which organization should we involve or collaborate with to prepare for the emergency?  By so doing, the team will consider the need to look for response effort from relevant organizations.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Reference

 

Chandra, A. (2011). Building community resilience to disasters: A way forward to enhance national

health security. Santa Monica, CA: RAND.