Building resilient communities

Background/Purpose: Community Resilience is the sustained ability to withstand, adapt to, and recover from adversity. Resiliency requires the whole community to strengthen, and leverage healthcare and business systems and networks already working well. Following a disaster, it is essential to restore healthcare and other systems quickly to avoid further injury and deterioration of public health. Government cannot meet all immediate needs of a community following a disaster. Communities must collaborate and build on existing capabilities for resilience. Methods: The Florida Department of Health has online toolkits with data for planning and evaluation, best practices, and resources to enhance community resiliency. These resources, plus hazard analyses and probability models provide important guides for increasing community and state resilience. An infrastructure of diverse coalitions provides ongoing input into new resources and best practices. Florida's diverse hazards-- including hurricanes, floods, and forest fires-- require varied resilience strategies to reduce vulnerabilities for over 19 million residents. Florida's resilience infrastructure includes 14 Cities Readiness Initiative projects; 35 Public Health Ready county health departments; client capacity of 36,744 for special needs shelters; capacity of 777,109 in general shelters; and 46 neighborhood preparedness projects for over 480,000 residents. Results/Outcomes: Tools bolster public health and partners to strengthen the whole community. Engaging and empowering communities augments positive gains. Communities use these resources for identifying stakeholders, vulnerabilities, and implementing corrective strategies. Participants will gain resources for supporting resilience. Conclusions: A shared responsibility among public health and community partners prepares, mitigates, responds, recovers, and adapts to all-hazards