This is a narrative review written by three experts in community medicine, disaster medicine and psychiatry reflecting the interdisciplinary approach in managing disasters. Selected important papers, personal published papers, PUBMED articles and media news related to the disaster management of the psychological effects of COVID-19 pandemic were collected over the last year, critically appraised and used in writing this manuscript.
Disaster Management Class 9 English.epub
The COVID-19 pandemic causes major emotional distress. Lack of effective treatments and availability of the current vaccines for this virus increases the fear of being infected and infecting others. Negative emotions are common and are related to adjustment but may progress in the long term to anxiety, depression, and post-traumatic stress syndrome. The COVID-19 pandemic has a major impact on mental health. The most common distress reactions include anxiety, insomnia, perception of insecurity, anger, fear of illness, and risky behaviors. Patients having mental disorders are vulnerable during the pandemic because of (1) somatic vulnerability, (2) cognitive and behavioral vulnerability, (3) psychosocial vulnerability, and (4) disruption to psychiatric care. Psychiatric wards, which are commonly separate from main hospitals, should be included in the disaster management plans. Acute care physicians carry the psychological and ethical impact of difficult triage decisions when ending the support of some patients to save others. A combination of fear and guilt may overcome normal human tolerance levels in vulnerable health workers. The moral injuries can be carried for a long time.
Addressing the psychological effects is an essential component of disaster management of infectious pandemics. This should be implemented through the whole spectrum of disaster management including preparedness, mitigation, response, and recovery.
Psychological impact has usually been ignored or has received only limited attention in disaster management plans. This review aims to address the early psychological impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, giving suggestions on how to mitigate these effects on the community, including health care providers, in the current COVID-19 pandemic as an essential component of disaster management.
The difficulties of educating psychiatric patients and making them adopt barrier measures and infectious isolation are particularly challenging. Psychiatric patients should be hospitalized if deemed necessary, for example if there was a risk to their life, or if they lack family support. It is important to note that in many countries psychiatric wards are remote from somatic medicine services and medical resuscitation units both geographically and professionally. This should be modified in disaster management plans.
Furthermore, sufficient resources should be available to support DV victims. Comprehensive DV guidelines that can be used during the response and recovery stages of disasters are already available [71]. The effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on DV and the methods to address it should be an integral part of disaster management in all its stages, and should be included in future research on the effects of COVID-19 [36].
Addressing psychological effects is an essential component of the disaster management of infectious pandemics. These effects can be serious and can affect healthy subjects, patients, and health care providers. Appropriate measures should be implemented through the whole spectrum of disaster management including the preparedness, mitigation, response, and recovery.
All authors contributed to the idea. MS-H retrieved the literature on the public health and wrote the sections on it. FA-Z retrieved the literature on the economic impact, domestic violence, health care workers, and disaster management and wrote the sections on it. ES retrieved the literature on different aspects of the psychological impact and wrote the sections on it. All authors read and approved the last version of the paper.
Preparedness: Almost all publications mentioned the importance of preparedness across a number of levels, including the individual, family and government. In spite of this, only a few publications identified specific preparedness activities that can be used to mitigate the effects of a disaster. For example, Tierney and Bruneau68 suggested that emergency management systems should create plans before a disaster on how the disaster-response processes would work. Similarly, risk assessment was believed to help with preparedness61. Actively involving community stakeholders in planning before a disaster, and running practice drills or exercises with a focus on risk management were cited as contributing to community resilience22,24. Carlson and colleagues69 suggested mitigation measures such as relocating buildings and infrastructure from flood-prone areas and/or flood-proofing structures, prior to a disaster. Altogether, the outputs of the planning, mitigation measures, and overall preparedness were intended to enable a sustainable response and recovery by the community, and to reduce the likelihood of harm to community members.
Most of these elements are already well-known within the disaster preparedness and crisis management fields outside of the specific rhetoric of community resilience; for example, risk and crisis communication has been extensively studied in respect to its role in disaster preparedness86,87,88. However, many of these elements are broad, overlapping in practice and need further clarification. For example, what specific economic processes are important in making a community resilient? What forms of social networks help in mitigating the effects of a disaster? What types of preparedness activities are most effective? Further progress on these and other questions might be best met by disaggregating the issues from the global concept of community resilience.
National and international researchers and policy makers have explored various strategies to address such problems, yet the problems remain. For example, research on solutions for megacities has been ongoing since the early 1990s [19, 20]. These studies have concluded that pollution, unreliable electricity, and non-functioning infrastructure are priority initiatives; nevertheless, air pollution, quality of water in cities, congestion, disaster management issues, and infrastructure are not being systematically addressed [19, 20]. 2ff7e9595c
Comments