Model of health? Distributed preparedness and multi-agency interventions surrounding UK regional airports

Adam Warren, Morag Bell and Lucy Budd

Social Science & Medicine, 2012, vol. 74, issue 2, 220-227

Abstract: The liberalisation of the European aviation sector has multiplied paths of entry into the United Kingdom (UK) for the international traveller. These changing mobilities necessitate a reconceptualisation of the border as a series of potentially vulnerable nodes occurring within, and extending beyond, national boundaries. In this paper, we consider the border through the lens of port health, the collective term for various sanitary operations enacted at international transport terminals. In the UK, a critical player in the oversight of port health is the Health Protection Agency (HPA), which became a non-Departmental public body in 2005. A major part of port health is preparedness, a set of techniques aimed at managing, and responding to, emergencies of public health concern. More recently, certain jurisdictions have embarked on public health preparedness work across a number of different geographical scales. Using methods pioneered by the military, this form of ‘distributed preparedness’ is of increased interest to social science and medical scholars. With reference to case studies conducted in localities surrounding two UK regional airports following the 2009–10 H1N1 influenza pandemic, we consider the extent to which distributed preparedness as a concept and a set of practices can inform current debates - in the UK, and beyond - concerning interventions at the border ‘within’.

Keywords: International aviation; Border health; Port health; Pandemic influenza; Distributed preparedness; UK regions; Multi-agency working (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2012
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0277953611006526
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:socmed:v:74:y:2012:i:2:p:220-227

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.elsevier.com/wps/find/supportfaq.cws_home/regional
http://www.elsevier. ... _01_ooc_1&version=01

DOI: 10.1016/j.socscimed.2011.10.011

Access Statistics for this article

Social Science & Medicine is currently edited by Ichiro (I.) Kawachi and S.V. (S.V.) Subramanian

More articles in Social Science & Medicine from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().