142nd APHA Annual Meeting and Exposition

Annual Meeting Recordings are now available for purchase

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Developing and testing a community resilience tabletop exercise in Los Angeles County

142nd APHA Annual Meeting and Exposition (November 15 - November 19, 2014): http://www.apha.org/events-and-meetings/annual
Monday, November 17, 2014

Anita Chandra, Dr.P.H. , Behavioral and Policy Sciences Department, RAND Corporation, Arlington, DC
Malcolm Williams, MPP, PhD , Health, RAND Corporation, Santa Monica, CA
David Eisenman, MD, MSHS , Center for Public Health and Disasters, UCLA Schools of Medicine and Public Health, Los Angeles, CA
Aizita Magana, MPH , Emergency Preparedness and Response Program, Los Angeles County Department of Public Health, Los Angeles, CA
Background/purpose. With the advent of community resilience policy, discussions have abounded regarding how communities can truly assess whether or not they are resilient before a disaster hits. While absolute resilience assessment may require a particular event, there is an opportunity to determine the extent to which communities are performing well on proxy indicators of resilience. Thus, an approach is needed to directly observe how communities may approach disaster response and recovery and whether they are employing strategies that will enhance resilience is needed.

Methods.  This presentation will describe the process of developing a community resilience tabletop, testing four levers of resilience (Chandra et al., 2011)-partnerships, engagement, self-sufficiency, and education.  The tabletop was subsequently tested with 8 community coalitions in the Los Angeles County Community Disaster Resilience Project.

Results. The coalitions provided critical feedback on tabletop design and the scenarios used. Overall, the tabletop afforded an ability for coalitions to determine how well they could activate integrated response and recovery plans, to identify where they did not know what asset a particular organization would offer in response and long-term recovery, and to assess how well their network of organizations reflected all of the key sectors needed for long-term recovery capability. 

Conclusions. The tabletop development and exercise process illustrated that it is possible to assess proxy indicators of resilience and stress the networks needed for efficient and effective response and recovery.

Learning Areas:

Planning of health education strategies, interventions, and programs
Public health or related nursing
Public health or related public policy
Public health or related research

Learning Objectives:
Identify ways to assess proxy indicators of resilience using four levers of community resilience. Discuss ways to incorporate exercise based methods in assessing resilience in communities.

Keyword(s): Partnerships, Disasters

Presenting author's disclosure statement:

Qualified on the content I am responsible for because: I have helped to lead the intellectual content of the Los Angeles County Community Disaster Resilience Project, including leading development of the tabletop exercise.
Any relevant financial relationships? No

I agree to comply with the American Public Health Association Conflict of Interest and Commercial Support Guidelines, and to disclose to the participants any off-label or experimental uses of a commercial product or service discussed in my presentation.