Oral

Many public health partners in the Sandy response have worked to provide a strategy and an infrastructure for bringing together resources and expertise to mobilize the highest quality social science, medical and public health knowledge within the local impacted community to address social service concerns, public health issues, human health monitoring and longer term recovery and resilience issues associated with the Hurricane Sandy disaster. The recovery strategy aims to include social service and public health intervention approaches based on the model of community-based participatory research (CBPR). Addressing health disparities and environmental justice concerns are a key component of Sandy impacted communities, who are multi-ethnic, multi-lingual and are lacking in comprehensive access to social and health services. The Sandy recovery strategy is deliberately designed to expeditiously initiate coordinated efforts to protect public health, increase community resilience and promote social recovery with maximal input from a broad diversity of stakeholders. Protection of responders and impacted community residents, both in the short term and in the longer term, is the main priority of the recovery framework. Our public health Recovery Strategy supports and advances a health in all policies approach that protects and promotes the health and well-being of minority and low-income populations with disproportionately high and adverse environmental exposures from Hurricane Sandy. Through collaborations with federal, state and local partners on initiatives related to sustainability and healthy communities, healthy schools, healthy housing, and healthy workplaces, we have advanced a health in all policies approach. We have learned that environmental health is critical to disaster recovery, as is disaster response. Those in public health also need to be trained on disaster response. As we have seen during the Sandy response, public health needs to play a much larger role in emergency response and recovery. This session will focus on the impact of severe weather emergencies from the perspective of occupational health and safety, environmental health, and public health nursing. Speakers will address on-the- ground experiences with Hurricane Sandy response operations, drawing on those and other disaster response incidents to analyze policy implications for preparedness and response efforts to protect the health of workers, communities, the environment, with particular emphasis on promoting health equity.

Session Objectives: List three environmental health issues that can emerge after storms like Hurricane Sandy. Describe two ways that emergency responders & public health professionals can work together on disaster response. Propose one possible policy approach to address community concerns about vulnerable populations and storm preparedness.