The Los Angeles County Community Disaster Resilience Project — A Community-Level, Public Health Initiative to Build Community Disaster Resilience

David Eisenman, Anita Chandra, Stella Fogleman, Aizita Magana, Astrid Hendricks, Ken Wells, Malcolm Williams, Jennifer Tang and Alonzo Plough
Additional contact information
David Eisenman: Los Angeles County Department of Public Health Emergency Preparedness and Response Program, 600 S. Commonwealth Avenue, Suite 700, Los Angeles, CA 90005, USA
Anita Chandra: RAND Corporation, 1200 South Hayes Street, Arlington, VA 22202, USA
Stella Fogleman: Los Angeles County Department of Public Health Emergency Preparedness and Response Program, 600 S. Commonwealth Avenue, Suite 700, Los Angeles, CA 90005, USA
Aizita Magana: Los Angeles County Department of Public Health Emergency Preparedness and Response Program, 600 S. Commonwealth Avenue, Suite 700, Los Angeles, CA 90005, USA
Astrid Hendricks: Los Angeles County Department of Public Health Emergency Preparedness and Response Program, 600 S. Commonwealth Avenue, Suite 700, Los Angeles, CA 90005, USA
Ken Wells: Center for Health Services and Society, UCLA Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior, David Geffen School of Medicine, 10920 Wilshire Boulevard, Suite 300, Los Angeles, CA 90024, USA
Malcolm Williams: RAND Corporation, 1776 Main Street, Santa Monica, CA 90401, USA
Jennifer Tang: Center for Health Services and Society, UCLA Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior, David Geffen School of Medicine, 10920 Wilshire Boulevard, Suite 300, Los Angeles, CA 90024, USA
Alonzo Plough: Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, Route 1 and College Road East, P.O. Box 2316, Princeton, NJ 08543, USA

IJERPH, 2014, vol. 11, issue 8, 1-16

Abstract: Public health officials need evidence-based methods for improving community disaster resilience and strategies for measuring results. This methods paper describes how one public health department is addressing this problem. This paper provides a detailed description of the theoretical rationale, intervention design and novel evaluation of the Los Angeles County Community Disaster Resilience Project (LACCDR), a public health program for increasing community disaster resilience. The LACCDR Project utilizes a pretest–posttest method with control group design. Sixteen communities in Los Angeles County were selected and randomly assigned to the experimental community resilience group or the comparison group. Community coalitions in the experimental group receive training from a public health nurse trained in community resilience in a toolkit developed for the project. The toolkit is grounded in theory and uses multiple components to address education, community engagement, community and individual self-sufficiency, and partnerships among community organizations and governmental agencies. The comparison communities receive training in traditional disaster preparedness topics of disaster supplies and emergency communication plans. Outcome indicators include longitudinal changes in inter-organizational linkages among community organizations, community member responses in table-top exercises, and changes in household level community resilience behaviors and attitudes. The LACCDR Project is a significant opportunity and effort to operationalize and meaningfully measure factors and strategies to increase community resilience. This paper is intended to provide public health and academic researchers with new tools to conduct their community resilience programs and evaluation research. Results are not yet available and will be presented in future reports.

Keywords: resilience; disaster; preparedness; public health; randomized trial; community engagement; organizational linkage; table-top exercise (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I I1 I3 Q Q5 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2014
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (6)

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