From 2010, Canterbury, a province of Aotearoa New Zealand, experienced three major disaster events. This study considers the socio-ecological impacts on cross-sectoral suicide prevention agencies and their service users of the 2010 – 2016 Canterbury earthquake sequence, the 2019 Christchurch mosque attacks and the COVID-19 pandemic in Canterbury. This study found the prolonged stress caused by these events contributed to a rise in suicide risk factors including anxiety, fear, trauma, distress, alcohol misuse, relationship breakdown, childhood adversity, economic loss and deprivation. The prolonged negative comment by the media on wellbeing in Canterbury was also unhelpful and affected morale. The legacy of these impacts was a rise in referrals to mental health services that has not diminished. This adversity in the socio-ecological system also produced post-traumatic growth, allowing Cantabrians to acquire resilience and help-seeking abilities to support them psychologically through the COVID-19 pandemic. Supporting parental and teacher responses, intergenerational support and targeted public health campaigns, as well as Māori family-centred programmes, strengthened wellbeing. The rise in suicide risk led to the question of what services were required and being delivered in Canterbury and how to enable effective cross-sectoral suicide prevention in Canterbury, deemed essential in all international and national suicide prevention strategies. Components from both the World Health Organisation Suicide Prevention Framework (WHO, 2012; WHO 2021) and the Collective Impact model (Hanleybrown et al., 2012) were considered by participants. The effectiveness of dynamic leadership and the essential conditions of resourcing a supporting agency were found as were the importance of processes that supported equity, lived experience and the partnership of Māori and non-Māori stakeholders. Cross-sectoral suicide prevention was found to enhance the wellbeing of participants, hastening learning, supporting innovation and raising awareness across sectors which might lower stigma. Effective communication was essential in all areas of cross-sectoral suicide prevention and clear action plans enabled measurement of progress. Identified components were combined to create a Collective Impact Suicide Prevention framework that strengthens suicide prevention implementation and can be applied at a local, regional and national level. This study contributes to cross-sectoral suicide prevention planning by considering the socio- ecological, policy and practice mitigations required to lower suicide risk and to increase wellbeing and post-traumatic growth, post-disaster. This study also adds to the growing awareness of the contribution that social work can provide to suicide prevention and conceptualises an alternative governance framework and practice and policy suggestions to support effective cross-sectoral suicide prevention.
Rapid, reliable information on earthquake-affected structures' current damage/health conditions and predicting what would happen to these structures under future seismic events play a vital role in accelerating post-event evaluations, leading to optimized on-time decisions. Such rapid and informative post-event evaluations are crucial for earthquake-prone areas, where each earthquake can potentially trigger a series of significant aftershocks, endangering the community's health and wealth by further damaging the already-affected structures. Such reliable post-earthquake evaluations can provide information to decide whether an affected structure is safe to stay in operation, thus saving many lives. Furthermore, they can lead to more optimal recovery plans, thus saving costs and time. The inherent deficiency of visual-based post-earthquake evaluations and the importance of structural health monitoring (SHM) methods and SHM instrumentation have been highlighted within this thesis, using two earthquake-affected structures in New Zealand: 1) the Canterbury Television (CTV) building, Christchurch; 2) the Bank of New Zealand (BNZ) building, Wellington. For the first time, this thesis verifies the theoretically- and experimentally validated hysteresis loop analysis (HLA) SHM method for the real-world instrumented structure of the BNZ building, which was damaged severely due to three earthquakes. Results indicate the HLA-SHM method can accurately estimate elastic stiffness degradation for this reinforced concrete (RC) pinched structure across the three earthquakes, which remained unseen until after the third seismic event. Furthermore, the HLA results help investigate the pinching effects on the BNZ building's seismic response. This thesis introduces a novel digital clone modelling method based on the robust and accurate SHM results delivered by the HLA method for physical parameters of the monitored structure and basis functions predicting the changes of these physical parameters due to future earthquake excitations. Contrary to artificial intelligence (AI) based predictive methods with black-box designs, the proposed predictive method is entirely mechanics-based with an explicitly-understandable design, making them more trusted and explicable to stakeholders engaging in post-earthquake evaluations, such as building owners and insurance firms. The proposed digital clone modelling framework is validated using the BNZ building and an experimental RC test structure damaged severely due to three successive shake-table excitations. In both structures, structural damage intensifies the pinching effects in hysteresis responses. Results show the basis functions identified from the HLA-SHM results for both structures under Event 1 can online estimate structural damage due to subsequent Events 2-3 from the measured structural responses, making them valuable tool for rapid warning systems. Moreover, the digital twins derived for these two structures under Event 1 can successfully predict structural responses and damage under Events 2-3, which can be integrated with the incremental dynamic analysis (IDA) method to assess structural collapse and its financial risks. Furthermore, it enables multi-step IDA to evaluate earthquake series' impacts on structures. Overall, this thesis develops an efficient method for providing reliable information on earthquake-affected structures' current and future status during or immediately after an earthquake, considerably guaranteeing safety. Significant validation is implemented against both experimental and real data of RC structures, which thus clearly indicate the accurate predictive performance of this HLA-based method.
