The Challenge

Simply put, Disaster Response and Disaster Management efforts worldwide have historically focused all that goes wrong when disaster strikes. Responders tend to group themselves according to fairly rigid definitions, particularly the “hard science” responders: emergency medicine and law enforcement, and the “soft science” responders: emergency psychology, counseling and psychosocial recovery specialists. These rigid boundaries have unfortunately hindered the entire performance required by the emergency management cycle of preparedness-mitigation-response-recovery. Additionally, the survivor and the survivor community is treated in a fragmented way due to the rigid separation of role and function between these two responder groups (‘hard’ versus ‘soft’ science approaches).

The challenge is: How to treat the survivor, their community and their region as a holistic entity with an integrated management response that brings emergency medicine and emergency psychosocial approaches into the management cycle from the very beginning allowing for the development and evolved practice of a new science of disaster management that focuses not only on all that goes wrong when tragedy and violence strike, but simultaneously focuses on how survivors and survivor communities normally engage in resilient behaviors, even as a disaster is occurring.