Mitigating Health Disparities After Natural Disasters: Lessons From The RISK Project: Study examines mitigating health disparities after natural disasters.
Name
nihms-1744835.pdf
Description
Accepted version
Size
75.22 KB
Format
Unknown
Checksum (MD5)
dc7849499704ca743ea9b76c241212a2
Author(s)
Raker, Ethan J
Arcaya, Mariana C
Lowe, Sarah R
Zacher, Meghan
Rhodes, Jean
Waters, Mary C
Date Issued
December 2020
Journal
Health Affairs
Publisher
Health Affairs (Project Hope)
Citation
Raker, Ethan J, Arcaya, Mariana C, Lowe, Sarah R, Zacher, Meghan, Rhodes, Jean et al. 2020. "Mitigating Health Disparities After Natural Disasters: Lessons From The RISK Project: Study examines mitigating health disparities after natural disasters.." Health Affairs, 39 (12).
Version
Author's final manuscript
Abstract
© 2020, Project HOPE. All rights reserved. Climate change exacerbates the severity of natural disasters, which disproportionately affect vulnerable populations. Mitigating disasters’ health consequences is critical to promoting health equity, but few studies have isolated the short-and long-term effects of disasters on vulnerable groups. We filled this gap by conducting a fifteen-year (2003– 2018) prospective study of low-income, predominantly Black parents who experienced Hurricane Katrina: the Resilience in Survivors of Katrina (RISK) Project. Here we describe this project and synthesize lessons from work that has resulted from it. Our findings can guide policy makers, service providers, and health officials in disaster planning and response. We synthesize them into an organizational schema of five priorities: Primary efforts should be aimed at preventing exposure to trauma through investments in climate resilience and by eliminating impediments to evacuation, health care policies should promote uninterrupted and expanded access to care, social services should integrate and strive to reduce the administrative burden on survivors, programs should aid survivors in forging or strengthening connections to their communities, and policy makers should fund targeted long-term services for highly affected survivors.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Urban Studies and Planning
Terms of Use
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike
Persistent DSpace Link
DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1377/HLTHAFF.2020.01161
