The Role Of Nurses In Disaster Management In Asia Pacific

This book documents how nurses have shown their dedication, courage, expertise and compassion in helping communities prepare for, respond to and recover from disastrous events. It aims to inspire and equip nurses and other health professionals to help people in disaster-affected areas and contribute to community resilience. The last decade (2005-2015) has been characterized by a number of overwhelming natural disasters - tropical storms, floods, earthquakes, tsunamis; and threats of emerging infectious diseases - SARS, MERSCoV and Ebola around the world. Countries from the Asia Pacific region, such as Australia, Cambodia, China, Indonesia, India, Japan, Nepal, Philippines, Solomon Islands, South Korea, Thailand and Vanuatu, have borne the brunt of the devastation caused by these catastrophic events. Nurses from these countries have stepped in providing emergency care in hospitals and in the field, addressing public health needs in evacuation centers, supporting epidemiologic surveillance and conducting health education, training and research, to help save lives and support communities build back better.

The Asia-Pacific region is one of the most vulnerable to a variety of natural and manmade hazards. This edited book productively brings together scholars and senior public officials having direct experience in dealing with or researching on recent major natural disasters in the Asia-Pacific. The chapters focus on disaster preparedness and management, including pre-event planning and mitigation, crisis leadership and emergency response, and disaster recovery. Specific events discussed in this book include a broad spectrum of disasters such as tropical storms and typhoons in the Philippines; earthquakes in China; tsunamis in Indonesia, Japan, and Maldives; and bushfires in Australia. The book aims to generate discussions about improved risk reduction strategies throughout the region. It seeks to provide a comparative perspective across countries to draw lessons from three perspectives: public policy, humanitarian systems, and community engagement.

A UN report recently found that the Asia Pacific is the world’s most disaster-prone region. Indeed, considering that the region accounts for more than half of the total number of disasters in the world, building capacity and resilience to mitigate the devastating impact of disasters is a pressing task for local actors. This book takes a regional, multidisciplinary and multi-actor approach to improve understandings of how various actors respond to natural and human-induced disasters in the Asia-Pacific region. It examines the ideas and activities of four different categories of agents: civil society; military and state institutions; local cultural knowledge and the media; and economic initiatives, and these themes are approached from various academic disciplines, ranging from anthropology and cultural studies to economics, human geography and political science. The contributors draw their findings from a variety of countries in the region, including China, Fiji, India, Indonesia, Japan, Myanmar and Samoa, and importantly, focus on the interconnection between vulnerability and resilience. In turn, the book highlights how the nature and magnitude of disasters are influenced by social conditions, and aims to contribute to policies that prioritize development opportunities to enhance resilience. Further, it explores the complicated and multifaceted role of agency in building resilience, and presents a comparative framework for analysis and key findings from the Asia-Pacific region. The focus of this book on recent and ongoing disasters makes it a topical and timely contribution to the growing field of disaster management, and as such it will appeal to students and scholars of environmental studies, development studies and Asian politics.

Around the world, people and societies are at risk of being affected by disasters, both natural and man-made. In the face of climate change and human activity, the threat posed by unexpected disasters is likely to increase in future. This book, the first of its kind in Hong Kong, offers insights from experts in healthcare and higher education both locally and further afield. Some of the authors have first-hand experience with various elements of disaster management through such events as the 2008 earthquake in Sichuan, the COVID-19 pandemic, and large-scale competitions including the Standard Chartered Hong Kong Marathon. Key learnings and recommendations are presented in three sections: disaster management and reconstruction, including what we can learn from past earthquakes; the importance of healthcare and emergency medicine in disasters and community events; and the way forward, in particular how technology and systems thinking can be used for disaster mitigation. By shedding light onto future work in disaster management and emergency medicine in Hong Kong and East Asia, this book aims to contribute to community resilience in the region and beyond. It will be useful for tertiary and postgraduate programmes, teachers and academics, practitioners, healthcare providers, policymakers, and community leaders.

The book outlines the regulatory environment for disaster prevention and management in broad social, economic and political context. The first half of the book focuses mainly on Japan, especially the ‘3-11’ events: the earthquake and tsunami that devastated the Tohoku area on 11 March 2011 and the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant radiation leaks. The second half focuses on the USA (the only other Asia-Pacific country to have experienced a serious nuclear emergency), Indonesia, China, New Zealand, Australia and international law. One question explored is whether socio-legal norms play different roles in preventing and managing responses to natural disasters compared to ‘man-made’ disasters. Another is how ‘disaster law’ interacts with society across very diverse societies in the disaster-prone Asia-Pacific region. The book also addresses the increasingly important roles played by international law and regional regimes for cross-border cooperation in disaster prevention and relief, including the functions played by military forces. Erudite, pragmatic, and charged with detailed, substantive knowledge of an astonishing range of contexts and research fields, this timely collection of important essays on the law and society of disaster management stands as an exemplary international academic response to the disasters of 11 March 2011. (Annelise Riles)

The primary aim of this textbook is to contribute towards the promotion of human security by educating nurses with a profound understanding of disaster nursing and to conduct innovative research and practices in cooperation. This textbook emphasizes on multi-professional connections; offers knowledge on how Japanese disaster nursing got evolved in changing social contexts and provides various case studies that reflect wonderful practices in the disaster nursing field which have contributed to the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction, the UN Sustainable Development Goals, and sustainable human security. Frequent disasters have triggered the need for more trans-disciplinary work, high-level care throughout all phases of a disaster event, and the need for nursing leaders. Apart from hospitals, in local communities, nurses can take a role to mitigate health risks. Being a member of every part of the healthcare system, they can become critically needed leaders in emergency management and disaster preparedness. This work includes a DRR Framework and the application to disaster nursing, information on preparedness and community resilience and on the related disciplines and coordination with disaster nursing. It informs on the challenges in disaster nursing, offers instructional design, education development and research in disaster nursing. Students, professional nurses, clinicians, community health practitioners, health volunteers, disaster support organizations, researchers, and community partners who are involved in the care of disaster survivors can use this resource. Written by distinguished experts with diverse backgrounds of nursing, public health, health informatics, and geography, this book shows how practitioners, researchers, policymakers, and multiple community stakeholders who can collaborate effectively and efficiently to restore primary health care of survivors after a local disaster.

The Department of Defense has long been able to play a major role in international humanitarian assistance and disaster response (HA/DR) due to its unique capabilities, manpower, and forward-deployed resources. The Asia-Pacific region is of particular importance to the United States because it bears the brunt of more than half of the world's natural disasters and is home to numerous key U.S. allies. In an effort to improve the effectiveness of HA/DR operations in the future, this report analyzes recent operations in Burma, Indonesia, Pakistan, and Japan, and identifies lessons that have emerged in the areas of (1) interagency coordination, (2) communication with the affected country, (3) coordination with other state and non-state actors, (4) prospects for U.S. security cooperation and building partner capacity for HA/DR, and (5) prospects for the increased involvement of regional organizations in HA/DR. This report also identifies complementary capabilities and comparative advantages that exist around the region, presents options for leveraging these capabilities to deal with future disasters, and assesses various crisis management mechanisms involving allies and partners that can be applied to other contingencies.

This book presents the health emergency and disaster risk management (H-EDRM) research landscape, with examples from Asia. In recent years, the intersection of health and disaster risk reduction (DRR) has emerged as an important interdisciplinary field. In several landmark UN agreements adopted in 2015–2016, including the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction 2015–2030, the 2030 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), the Paris climate agreement, and the New Urban Agenda (Habitat III), health is acknowledged as an inevitable outcome and a natural goal of disaster risk reduction, and the cross-over of the two fields is essential for the successful implementation of the Sendai Framework. H-EDRM has emerged as an umbrella field that encompasses emergency and disaster medicine, DRR, humanitarian response, community health resilience, and health system resilience. However, this fragmented, nascent field has yet to be developed into a coherent discipline. Key challenges include redundant research, lack of a strategic research agenda, limited development of multisectoral and interdisciplinary approaches, deficiencies in the science–policy–practice nexus, absence of standardized terminology, and insufficient coordination among stakeholders. This book provides a timely and invaluable resource for undergraduate and postgraduate students, researchers, scholars, and frontline practitioners as well as policymakers from across the component domains of H-EDRM.