Tuesday, October 21, 1997
New course probes disaster relief
NEW PROGRAM Grad-level class strives to improve response, crisis
coping
By Teresa Jun
Daily Bruin Contributor
When Harvinder Sareen, a doctoral student in public health,
first moved to Los Angeles in 1993, she was completely unprepared
for the shock that suddenly jolted her out of bed at 4:31 one
morning.
The 6.7-point Northridge earthquake destroyed many of Sareen’s
treasured belongings in her new apartment.
"It was like a horrible nightmare," Sareen remembers. "It’s a
really horrible feeling to know that everything you’ve created all
your life can just all of a sudden be destroyed."
As part of a result of her traumatic experience, Sareen enrolled
in a new graduate-level course offered as part of a new program in
the UCLA School of Public Health.
With generous funding from the Los Angeles County Board of
Supervisors, the school recently created a program titled the UCLA
Center for Public Health and Disaster Relief (CPHDR).
The new program promotes academic research into disaster
recovery and offers a new graduate-level curriculum focusing on
disaster preparedness for students as well as professionals.
"We’ve seen many disasters hit us just within the last 10
years," said Loc Nguyen, program coordinator of the CPHDR. "With
the recent upsurge of natural disasters, it’s time we prepared for
the next one."
The program is already under way with one class offered this
quarter. Titled CHS 295, "Selected Topics in Disaster Relief and
Humanitarian Assistance," the course consists of less than 10
students.
Students in the class learn such things as the psychological
condition of people after major disasters, based on studies.
Sareen, a student in the class, finds the course enlightening and
hopes the program will grow with time.
"Other students (not in the School of Public Health) might be
interested in the class too," Sareen said. "Not for professional
purposes, but for personal purposes because the class is about
preparedness for disasters."
Many local and national disaster organizations are joining the
effort. The American Red Cross, the state Office of Emergency
Services, the World Health Organization and the Federal Emergency
Management Agency are among the organizations which have shown
interest in cooperating with CPHDR to improve disaster response and
preparation in Los Angeles.
As part of the program’s new educational curriculum, a unique
environment will be created in which professionals from the field
can enroll in classes with UCLA students. This should help them
keep up with what’s new in research.
"The curriculum-based approach provides a forum to allow people
to stay connected and talking on a regular basis even when no
disasters are occurring," said Project Director Debbie Davenport.
"Instead of just (holding) one big conference, and then months or
years later when a disaster finally happens, the information is
lost, forgotten, or outdated."
Some time down the road, CPHDR hopes to offer these
disaster-related courses through UCLA Extension so that more
professionals will be able to attend during the evenings.
This unique curriculum bridges the gap between students and
professionals and allows students and professionals to learn from
each other.
Practitioners from the field can "bring their experiences with
them into the classroom, and at the same time, broaden their
educational base," said Steven Rottman, the center director.
Likewise, students will hear from firsthand experience what
theories actually don’t work well in the real world, and which hold
up.
In addition to its newly-designed curriculum, the program also
emphasizes research into various disaster issues such as recovery
and preparation.
One ongoing research project is research surrounding the
familiar Northridge earthquake. Through exhaustive surveys and
interviews with nearly 2,000 households in L.A. county, researchers
at UCLA are looking into such information as levels of
preparedness, injury patterns afterward and levels of first-aid
knowledge in order to assess the overall preparedness of the
community at large.
One lesson learned in the Northridge quake was that teams of
emergency managers and officials weren’t as collaborative as they
should have been in order to respond more efficiently.
Another research project currently under way probes at how
emergency managers can allocate resources more effectively after a
disaster.
"One of the goals is to learn how we can achieve more
cooperation in order to gain efficient access and use of resources
in response to disasters," Davenport said.
By introducing and addressing these various aspects of disaster
relief, the CPHDR and its new program represent a revolutionary and
unique way to approach the problem of improving response and
preparation to disaster situations.
"This effort forms the first major collaboration between a
premier educational institution – the UCLA School of Public Health
– and a major local health agency – the Los Angeles County
Department of Health Services – in addressing how natural and
human-generated disasters affect the public’s health," Rottman
stated.