Introduction to Planning and Preparedness
In some ways, health care professionals must prepare for disasters the same way as everyone else. The information in the public section of this website will be very helpful for you, in educating yourself about various disaster possibilities in your area (PDF), developing a written disaster plan (PDF), for your home and for your place of work (PDF), compiling and storing your disaster supply kits (PDF), and preparing in other physical and tangible ways for a disaster.
In addition, health care professionals must address another important component of preparedness and planning: mental health. How can you as a health professional prepare and plan for a disaster so that you may not only survive it personally but respond to it in a way that promotes your growth and that of others? Preparedness includes not only the essential actions and information-gathering referenced above, but mental health as well. Being prepared can reduce fear, anxiety, and losses that accompany disasters.
The U.S. Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (PDF), assembled a group of experts to study what helps people through disaster. The results of these studies included ten common features of a mentally healthy response to disaster events.
These fundamental components of recovery are:
- An individualized and person-centered approach. Each of us must prepare and plan for disasters in a way that “fits” with how we are human. For example, a disaster that involves relocation will be experienced differently for someone who has recently moved to a city compared to someone who has lived there all of her life. (links to other fact sheets here)
- Self-direction: Although other people can influence and assist with our response to life events, including disasters, we must keep in mind that each person’s experience of a disaster is unique. Accordingly, we must make personalized decisions based on what we know to be best for us.
- Hope: Psychologists have found that hope, something that other traditions might refer to as positive outlook or even faith, can help people to prepare for and experience disasters in a mentally healthy fashion.
- Responsibility: Although resources, including websites such as this one, can help in preparation, ultimately disasters demand that we respond in ways that take responsibility, in ways that are our own.
- Empowerment: The essence of preparedness is to be empowered, to be able to be a participant in the process of disaster response, not be a mere victim. Additional information about empowerment is located throughout our website.
- Respect: People experiencing disasters remain, first and foremost, people. A mentally healthy approach to disasters respects and honors personal experience and meaning-making.
- Peer-support: Although each of us will experience a disaster in ways that are unique to us and to our experience, and although we can count on governmental and other agencies to assist us through these experiences, reliance on those around us and similar to us is also an important feature of a mentally healthy response to disasters.
- Strengths-based: Our approach to mental health in disaster is founded on the idea that people are fundamentally strong, and that rather than speaking to deficits or shortcomings, we build our response to disasters on these strengths.
- Non-linear: Although some elements of disasters and our responses to them are predictable in terms of progressing through phases toward a defined outcome, a mentally healthy response to disaster takes its own journey, sometimes with twists and turns and according to its own timetable. Responding to and recovering from disaster is a personal and unique experience.
- Holistic: This element of preparedness, response, and recovery emphasizes how disasters are part of a whole life and culture and time, and although having some special features, they are not separate from other human experience.
Web Links
This site lists SAMHSA’s 10 fundamental components of Recovery (PDF)