Social Component In Community Health Resilience To Earthquake: Theoretical And Empirical Study

Community health resilience to earthquakes refers to the capacity of a community to prepare for,respond to,and recover from the impact of earthquakes so as to reduce mortality and morbidity of the local community.Technical infrastructure,hospitals,and residents are the key elements in community health resilience.The current studies mainly focus on the technical component in these key elements and neglect the social component attributed to individual and organizational behavior responding to the post-earthquake environment that is crucial for community health resilience.This study aims to explore the mechanism of social components in these three key elements to provide a theoretical basis and decision-making support for improving community health resilience to earthquakes.Firstly,the study developed a maturity model for infrastructure resilience management to explore the capability of the infrastructure service providers to prepare,respond,and recover from the earthquakes in providing technical support to the emergency medical response at the hospital.By adopting the concept of disaster risk management and stakeholder theory,a modified Delphi technique was applied to develop an evaluation indicator system of infrastructure resilience management.The identified indicators were further integrated into an infrastructure resilience management maturity model.The maturity model provided a useful guideline for evaluating the status quo of the infrastructure resilience management,identifying the weaknesses,and suggesting priority for improvement.Secondly,the study examined the impact of management,leadership,and group integration on the hospital response readiness for earthquakes.Literature review and expert interviews were conducted to construct the factors structure of the hospital response readiness model.Hierarchical component analysis was applied to verify the validity and reliability of the measurement and structural models of the hospital response readiness.The model revealed the relationship paths of the factors influencing hospital response readiness and enabled to offer suggestions for improvement of hospital response readiness to provide efficient emergency medical response in the post-earthquake environment and reduce mortality and morbidity of the residents.Thirdly,the study explored the mechanism of protective behavior in earthquakes,which is directly related to the casualty risk among the residents.The influencing factors and indicators on protective behavior were identified through literature review and were constructed into a questionnaire for assessing protective behavior.A questionnaire survey was conducted to a community and a hierarchical logistic regression model was applied to examine the factors affecting their protective behavior.The model identified the significant factors that influenced their adopted preparedness behavior for earthquakes,which consequently affected their anticipated response behavior to earthquakes.The protective behavior model proposed suggestions for better engagement of protective behavior in earthquakes to reduce the mortality and morbidity of the residents and therefore lessen the medical demands that overload the hospital capacity.Finally,this study conducted a case study to assess community health resilience of a community in Beijing.The empirical analysis examined the social component in technical infrastructure,hospitals,and residents,contributing to the community health resilience.Based on the findings,recommendations for improving community health resilience were given,and their practical values were verified through two rounds of interviews and one experiment.The results of the case study demonstrated that the mechanism models of social component enabled to provide a feasible scientific solution for improving community health resilience.This study conducted a theoretical and empirical analysis on the social component in technical infrastructure,hospitals,and residents,which contributes to the community health resilience to earthquakes.The model analysis offered insight into the mechanism of social component affecting community health resilience to earthquakes.The developed measurement tools enabled the decision-makers to effectively evaluate and identify the challenges and propose scientifically feasible and effective solutions for improving community health resilience.