Author: By Marcienne Wright, Science Policy Advisor, Office of the Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response
After a disaster, people look for the best ways to recover and move on with their lives. In hard-hit areas recovery can take years, and community members must decide how to rebuild their healthcare systems and their entire communities in ways that respond better, recover more quickly, and withstand future disasters.
Often, these kinds of decisions are based on past experience or lessons learned from other communities. There is a pressing need for solid scientifically based research to help communities make decisions with confidence.
That’s why, in the wake of Hurricane Sandy, three HHS agencies – ASPR, CDC, and NIEHS – awarded a series of research grants to give hard hit communities data to drawn on as they make tough decisions about how to recover effectively from Hurricane Sandy and how to strengthen their resilience for future disaster preparedness in the process.
This week these three agencies did something pretty unusual — we convened a meeting with this group of grantees who will be researching public health, environmental health and healthcare in Sandy-impacted communities along with their public health and community partners. The meeting’s goal was to encourage grantees to explore opportunities for collaboration at the beginning, rather than at the end, of their projects.
Our grantees and their research partners were wildly enthusiastic. Distinct groups of researchers now want to work together to better support community needs in Sandy-impacted areas, do better science without duplication, and advance scientific knowledge on building resilience in these communities.
Researchers working in and collaborating with health departments in New York City, New Jersey, and Long Island discovered that, for some questions about the causes of increased mortality, they are using similar methods to create their datasets. Because of this meeting, they learned that there is an opportunity for them to now collaborate on this aspect of their research.
Steelworkers and other unions working with NIEHS on worker safety and clean up offered to collaborate with healthcare system response researchers on ways to strengthen healthcare worker resilience. Bringing groups like these together holds exciting possibilities.
We appreciate the willingness of everyone at the meeting to share information on their research projects and to explore taking a new and collaborative approach to advancing science, recovery, and resilience.
The research being conducted in Sandy-impacted communities is an example of what’s needed to support the decisions that communities across the country must make after disasters and every day – decisions about infrastructure, policies, procedures, partnerships, coalitions, and funding that drive your community’s resilience.
A better understanding of the science supporting response and recovery is absolutely needed for communities across the country – including yours – to become as ready and resilient as possible so that health stands up to disaster.
Sharing the information gained from this research with the impacted community and the nation is vital to building a country that is resilient to whatever comes our way. These projects as well as future studies initiated by the scientific community hold tremendous potential to bring people together to talk about tough decisions and difficult topics. A bonus to bringing people together for research purposes is that the action can lead to new coalitions, new partnerships and in turn stronger communities.
Potential researchers: think about it; by pursuing this line of inquiry you could help strengthen the health security of our entire nation. To learn about the projects underway now, visit www.hhs.gov/sandy.
