ABSTRACT
COVID-19 made significant health, economic, and social impact across the world. The situation urgently needs to strengthen disaster risk reduction strategies to reduce risks and enhance resilience. Nevertheless, many instances have evidenced disaster risk governance-related issues. This study examined the United Kingdom's present disaster risk governance system since the country has been hit significantly by the pandemic. The study evaluates the risk governance system in the United Kingdom across the key elements of the International Risk Governance Framework. The study conducted a systematic literature review following a literature review protocol. Documents were selected from the Science Direct, Emerald, and Google Scholar databases. Across the framework elements, several challenges were found within the UK's pandemic risk governance system. The study highlights the strength of the well-developed legal and policy supported the country's risk governance system. Even though the study was conducted at the early stage of the pandemic, the early findings will benefit policymakers and practitioners shaping the pandemic risk governance system in the country for a resilient society. © 2022 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
ABSTRACT
COVID-19 pandemic has given insights into the systemic risks of a hazard, demonstrating the potency of biological hazards to not only render one sector dysfunctional but also fail the entire system. The grave and devastating impacts of the current COVID-19 call for the need to assess the state of global and national preparedness for future pandemics. This chapter provides an outline of Sri Lanka's response to the COVID-19 pandemic while delving into the current status and gaps concerning preparedness for pandemics in the country. The analysis is aimed at providing key recommendations for policymakers to improve national-level preparedness for anticipated pandemic threats. This chapter has drawn on a review of secondary literature and primary data gathered through in-depth interviews conducted with key informants in the disaster management and public health sectors in the country. Findings show that while preparedness planning for biological hazards is predominantly a responsibility of the health sector in the country, there is a pressing need to strengthen such preparedness through a unified legal framework and system of governance that allow for the transfer of relevant expertise, infrastructure, and lessons learned from previous hazards contexts to situations of pandemics;the incorporation of pandemic preparedness into national-level DRR efforts and subnational-level DRR planning;intensifying national focus on building economic and social resilience;emulating a multisectoral approach, enhancing private sector participation, and establishing a national framework to foster preparedness for parallel hazards. © 2022 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
ABSTRACT
Without any doubt, the outbreak of novel coronavirus;mostly known as COVID-19 has divided the recent timeline of world into three periods namely, before COVID-19, during COVID-19 and after COVID-19. The devastating impacts that occurred during COVID-19 have already been a wake-up call towards how the existing systems should be strengthened for the period after COVID-19 to mitigate the risk of future pandemics. During the pandemic, functionality of healthcare facilities started to fail in a cascading manner highlighting the need for addressing the systemic nature of risks with novel approaches. Architects, engineers, healthcare professionals, and policymakers have started to plan on how the future healthcare facilities have to be altered for the new normal, COVID-19. This paper delves into the challenges rendered on healthcare facilities during COVID-19, immediate actions taken to mitigate the impacts, and new approaches suggested for the period after COVID-19. The study has drawn on a review of recently published scholarly articles, reports, international and national policy and frameworks, news items, magazine articles, etc. pertaining to the behavior of healthcare facilities during the crisis and future hospital designs. Apart from the challenges and immediate actions in mitigating the negative impacts, this paper has summarized new approaches for future hospital designs under two categories namely, hospital design and built environment, and hospital management and operation. It is evident that pandemic has highlighted the paramount importance of sustainable Disaster Risk Reduction (DRR) strategies towards more resilient healthcare facilities in the future. But still, these new approaches have to be further validated through multi-sectoral approaches since the crisis is not still over. © 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd.