Will a community based participatory research approach make us better prepared?

Natural and man-made disasters are common in the U.S especially in southern California. Low income minority populations living in inland counties face a greater risk of being severely affected by these disasters. Environmental health (EH) professionals equipped with knowledge and skills in emergency preparedness (EP) and planning devote much of their time to providing fee-for-service activities. This has left vulnerable communities at poor preparation levels. Community based organizations using community engagement strategies have a better understanding of these communities' needs, and assets. In exploring community engagement in disaster preparation and planning, this study proposes to train the EH professionals on Community Based Participatory Research (CBPR) approaches to use in building relationships with the vulnerable populations and integrating them into environmental health emergency preparedness (EHEP) aspects of their departments. Creating these linkages is likely to increase the EP capacity of both EH professionals and the communities that they serve. To best inform community engagement, needs and asset assessment (NA+A) using windshield surveys, participant observations, semi-structured interviews and confirmatory focus groups among community members and EH professionals was done. Data was transcribed, coded, themed and analyzed using grounded theory. Results showed poor community engagement and a lack of knowledge on emergency preparation and planning. Development of CBPR-emergency preparation program is ongoing. This will inform the use of CBPR approaches that will be compared with the traditional expert-driven approach. The results will help in development of a toolkit that will be used to enhance emergency preparedness and increase resilience in vulnerable communities.