A video of a presentation by David Meates, Chief Executive of the Christchurch District Health Board and the West Coast District Health Board, during the first plenary of the 2016 People in Disasters Conference. The presentation is titled, "Local System Perspective".The abstract for this presentation reads as follows: The devastating Canterbury earthquakes of 2010 and 2011 have resulted in challenges for the people of Canterbury and have altered the population's health needs. In the wake of New Zealand's largest natural disaster, the health system needed to respond rapidly to changing needs and damaged infrastructure in the short-term in the context of developing sustainable long-term solutions. Canterbury was undergoing system transformation prior to the quakes, however the horizon of transformation was brought forward post-quake: 'Vision 2020' became the vision for now. Innovation was enabled as people working across the system addressed new constraints such as the loss of 106 acute hospital beds, 635 aged residential care beds, the loss of general practices and pharmacies as well as damaged non-government organisation sector. A number of new integration initiatives (e.g. a shared electronic health record system, community rehabilitation for older people, community falls prevention) and expansion of existing programs (e.g. acute demand management) were focused on supporting people to stay well in their homes and communities. The system working together in an integrated way has resulted in significant reductions in acute health service utilisation in Canterbury. Acute admission rates have not increased and remain significantly below national rates and the number of acute and rehabilitation bed days have fallen since the quakes, with these trends most evident among older people. However, health needs frequently reported in post-disaster literature have created greater pressures on the system. In particular, an escalating number of people facing mental health problems and coping with acute needs of the migrant rebuild population provide new challenges for a workforce also affected by the quakes. The recovery journey for Canterbury is not over.
A video of a presentation by Dr Scott Miles during the Community Resilience Stream of the 2016 People in Disasters Conference. The presentation is titled, "A Community Wellbeing Centric Approach to Disaster Resilience".The abstract for this presentation reads as follows: A higher bar for advancing community disaster resilience can be set by conducting research and developing capacity-building initiatives that are based on understanding and monitoring community wellbeing. This presentation jumps off from this view, arguing that wellbeing is the most important concept for improving the disaster resilience of communities. The presentation uses examples from the 2010 and 2011 Canterbury earthquakes to illustrate the need and effectiveness of a wellbeing-centric approach. While wellbeing has been integrated in the Canterbury recovery process, community wellbeing and resilience need to guide research and planning. The presentation unpacks wellbeing in order to synthesize it with other concepts that are relevant to community disaster resilience. Conceptualizing wellbeing as either the opportunity for or achievement of affiliation, autonomy, health, material needs, satisfaction, and security is common and relatively accepted across non-disaster fields. These six variables can be systematically linked to fundamental elements of resilience. The wellbeing variables are subject to potential loss, recovery, and adaptation based on the empirically established ties to community identity, such as sense of place. Variables of community identity are what translate the disruption, damage, restoration, reconstruction, and reconfiguration of a community's different critical services and capital resources to different states of wellbeing across a community that has been impacted by a hazard event. With reference to empirical research and the Canterbury case study, the presentation integrates these insights into a robust framework to facilitate meeting the challenge of raising the standard of community disaster resilience research and capacity building through development of wellbeing-centric approaches.
A video of a presentation by Richard Conlin during the Community Resilience Stream of the 2016 People in Disasters Conference. The presentation is titled, "Resilience, Poverty, and Seismic Culture".The abstract for this presentation reads as follows: A strategy of resilience is built around the recognition that effective emergency response requires community involvement and mobilization. It further recognizes that many of the characteristics that equip communities to respond most effectively to short term emergencies are also characteristics that build strong communities over the long term. Building resilient communities means integrating our approaches to poverty, community engagement, economic development, and housing into a coherent strategy that empowers community members to engage with each other and with other communities. In this way, resilience becomes a complementary concept to sustainability. This requires an asset-based change strategy where external agencies meet communities where they are, in their own space, and use collective impact approaches to work in partnership. This also requires understanding and assessing poverty, including physical, financial, and social capital in their myriad manifestations. Poverty is not exclusively a matter of class. It is a complex subject, and different communities manifest multiple versions of poverty, which must be respected and understood through the asset-based lens. Resilience is a quality of a community and a system, and develops over time as a result of careful analysis of strengths and vulnerabilities and taking actions to increase competencies and reduce risk situations. Resilience requires maintenance and must be developed in a way that includes practicing continuous improvement and adaptation. The characteristics of a resilient community include both physical qualities and 'soft infrastructure', such as community knowledge, resourcefulness, and overall health. This presentation reviews the experience of some earlier disasters, outlines a working model of how emergency response, resilience, and poverty interact and can be addressed in concert, and concludes with a summary of what the 2010 Chilean earthquake tells us about how a 'seismic culture' can function effectively in communities even when government suffers from unexpected shortcomings.
