Disaster planning is only as good as the assumptions on which it is based. However, some of these assumptions are derived from a conventional wisdom that is at variance with empirical field disaster research studies. Knowledge of disaster research findings might help planners avoid common disaster management pitfalls, thereby improving disaster response planning. To illustrate the point, this a...

In emergencies, exceptions to data protection raise concerns that data may become available to unexpected actors during and after a crisis, resulting in privacy intrusion and social sorting. Apart from ethical issues, there are legal issues, for example around data minimization and issues around social and cultural practices of sharing information. This paper explores key ethical, legal and soc...

It is a privilege to publish the 2011 Harvard Humanitarian Action Summit summaries in this issue of Prehospital and Disaster Medicine. The annual Humanitarian Action Summits, which began in 2009, have included international experts from all fields of the humanitarian community. The 2011 Summit was particularly important because those attending were able to review and analyze the humanitarian ac...

Assessing the changing dynamic between the demand that is placed upon a community by cumulative exposure to hazards and the capacity of the community to mitigate or respond to that risk represents a central problem in estimating the community’s resilience to disaster. This paper presents an initial effort to simulate the dynamic between increasing demand and decreasing capacity in an actual dis...

Perspectives The United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities has firmly placed disability in a human rights perspective. In the context of the Convention, disability refers to activity limitations and participation restrictions that result from the interaction of an impairment of body function or structure with environmental factors. The Convention addresses the rights ...

Dr. Weiss has asked that we develop one-or twopage vignettes or case studies explaining specific areas of psychological research that pertain to various aspects of disaster preparedness and recovery. These need to be written for the non-psychologists and they should explain why this research may help inform policy. These vignettes should also provide a summary of data and a brief history of the...

Increasing numbers of natural disasters and man-made disasters, such as earthquakes, tsunamis, floods, air crashes, etc., have posed a challenge to the public and demonstrated the importance of disaster management. The success of disaster management, amongst all, largely depends on finding and successfully integrating related information to make decisions during the response phase. This informa...

This article describes how a mental health disaster response plan, which resulted from a collaborative effort between the Arkansas Department of Health and the Arkansas Chapter of the National Association of Social Workers, was used successfully to meet the needs of more than 1,000 displaced survivors of Hurricane Katrina. Included is a discussion of how the components of established disaster r...