It could also inform strategies for equitable resilience and recovery, where resilience practice takes into account issues of social vulnerability and differential access to power, knowledge and resources . However, limited research has specifically explored its intersection with health emergency communication or the notion of community-centred resilience. Assumptions about communities can fuel misinformation and mistrust, underscoring the importance of targeted, community-centred interventions that include less visible and more vulnerable groups 34, 74,75,76. During public health emergencies, such as the COVID-19 pandemic, the need for effective communication between agencies and communities is paramount for saving lives 54,55,56. Recently, the notion of ‘community-centred resilience’ has emerged in the face of criticisms about the limitations of top-down disaster planning .

This raises the question of how to engage with, involve and support paid and unpaid carer groups in health emergency planning and better utilise their networks in emergency response efforts. Facilitating community structures as channels for communication involves various strategies to ensure effective dissemination of health emergency information and engagement with diverse community groups. Involving communities in planning and response efforts, either through open community meetings or online forums, fosters a sense of community ownership and empowerment 1, 18.

Posttraumatic Stress

Searches were run across Medline, PsycInfo, and EMBASE, with search terms covering both community resilience and social capital, public health emergencies, and mental health. Findings from this study informed the development of a multi-system disaster resilience framework for social work that links individual resilience capacities to broader community resilience capacities to foster multiple adaptive pathways following successive disaster events. Individual resilience was inversely related to PTS and depression FEMA Mental Health Technology Resources symptoms and played an important role in mediating the relationship between community resilience and mental health outcomes. Despite these limitations, this study takes an important step towards identifying and testing individual and community capacities to identify how they contribute to better mental health outcomes following successive disaster events.

Resilience: Concepts, Approaches, Indicators, and Interventions for Sustainability of Positive Mental Health

• Or if you think about the biological measures predicting recovery or treatment, there might be an ability to use technologies and research and genetics or epigenetics or molecular biology to match people to the interventions that are going to be most likely to help them achieve success.
• Too much danger will cause a child’s nervous system to regulate at a level that over-extends the resources of person and body.
• Many organizations have limited resources, and we can’t all be experts in everything.
• Both before and after a disaster, risk communication should provide accurate information about possible threats.

Scored simply as a count of losses tallied from an inventory, resource loss has correlated highly with symptom severity in several disaster studies (Norris et al. 2002b). This phenomenon wherein resources are themselves harmed by the stressors they are presumed to buffer severely limits the protection resources can afford. The concept of resource loss has become central in stress theory, primarily because of the influence of Hobfoll’s (1988, 1998, 2006) theory of “conservation of resources” (COR). In a case study of the Emergency Operations Center (EOC) after the 2001 World Trade Center Disaster, Kendra and Wachtendork (2003) showed how the EOC’s ability to rapidly access other resources substituted for lack of redundancy of personnel, equipment, and space when the EOC was destroyed in the attack. We found the discussion of Bruneau et al. (2003) especially enlightening for thinking about the dynamic attributes that resources must have to engender resilience. Effects that seem small in analyses of individuals may be quite large when extrapolated to entire populations.

Using Technology to Enhance, Not Replace, Human Connection

The “prevention paradox” (Rose 1981, 2001) is extremely important for future judgments regarding the relative influence (and significance for policy) of individual and community resilience-resources. Well communities show not only high average levels of these conditions but limited disparities in mental and behavioral health between rich and poor, young and old, White and not, men and women, and so forth. This choice ties the concept of resilience to the traditional concerns of the public health and mental health fields. First, to increase their resilience to disaster, communities must develop economic resources, reduce risk and resource inequities, and attend to their areas of greatest social vulnerability. For the most part, social support captures helping behaviors within family and friendship networks, but social capital also encompasses relationships between individuals and their larger neighborhoods and communities (Perkins et al. 2002; Perkins and Long 2002; Saegert and Winkel 2004).

Successful linkages were made for a diverse set of resources reflecting the needs specific to each community both pre- (85%) and during (87%) COVID-19. Providers would check-in weekly by phone or text message to maintain a connection with families and support emerging needs even though community activity groups no longer met in person. Trauma-informed practices support the engagement and education of community members through the application of the core principles of safety, trustworthiness and transparency, collaboration and mutuality, empowerment, choice, and cultural competence and humility 16, 29, 30. These partnerships are comprised of community-based organizations engaged in trauma-informed capacity-building strategies within their organizations that were specific to the needs of their communities. Group activities included ongoing programming and classes which were designed to foster social connectedness and resilience. The Referral and Linkage Tracker documented referrals made for specific individuals and tracked whether the linkage was successful, unsuccessful, or in progress.

However, a previous systemic review conducted by Patel et al. (2017) concludes that there are nine core elements of CR (local knowledge, community networks and relationships, communication, health, governance and leadership, resources, economic investment, preparedness, and mental outlook), with 19 further sub-elements therein . Therefore, interventions which aim to raise community level social participation, with the aim of expanding social connections and gaining support, may be beneficial 42, 47. Furthermore, gender differences should also be considered as research indicates that males and females may react differently to community level SC (as evidence suggests males are instead more impacted by individual level SC; in comparison to women who have larger and more diverse social networks ). It is proposed that corrosive communities often emerge due to a loss of natural resources that bring social groups together (e.g., for recreational activities), as well as social disparity (e.g., due to unequal distribution of economic impact) becoming apparent in the community following disaster . All three of these studies concluded that disasters may have a negative impact on the levels of SC within a community. ; and, (4) What types of interventions enhance community resilience and social capital?