State of community resilience approaches in public health

Background/purpose. Community resilience has become a guiding framework of national policy requiring the alignment between acute response to emergency events and the provision of routine public health promotion and prevention activities. But, it is unclear where opportunities exist to link community resilience frameworks and policy to broader public health practice.

Methods.  This presentation will describe an analysis of where community resilience frameworks can be applied to broader public health practice, through two community resilience initiatives- Resilient DC and the Los Angeles County Community Disaster Resilience Project. Each initiative has required engagement of the full public health sector and has identified opportunities for embedding resilience principles into general public health practice. Survey data combined with qualitative lessons learned from these initiatives will be shared. The eight levers of resilience framework (wellness, access, engagement, etc) described by Chandra et al. (2011) will be used to organize findings.

Results. Public health departments have an opportunity to prepare for both routine and acute events by engaging in unique partnerships with nontraditional stakeholders, linking across divisions and activities for broader community wellness, and developing strategies that help prepare public health for the long-term impacts (e.g., recovery) of a range of community stressors.

Conclusions. The community resilience framework holds great promise as an organizing framework for public health. While currently these frameworks are limited to emergency preparedness policy, they could be used in prevention and related public health strategies.