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Building Emergency Response Capacity: Multi-Career-Stage Social Workers’ Engagement with Homeless Sector during the First Two Waves of COVID-19 in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada

The dramatic increase of global extreme events (e.g., natural, technological, and willful hazards) propels social workers to be equipped with emergency response capacity, supporting affected individuals, families, and communities to prepare, respond, and recover from disasters. Although social worke...

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Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores principales: Wu, Haorui, Karabanow, Jeff, Hoddinott, Tonya
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: MDPI 2022
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9566631/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/36232013
http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/ijerph191912713
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author Wu, Haorui
Karabanow, Jeff
Hoddinott, Tonya
author_facet Wu, Haorui
Karabanow, Jeff
Hoddinott, Tonya
author_sort Wu, Haorui
collection PubMed
description The dramatic increase of global extreme events (e.g., natural, technological, and willful hazards) propels social workers to be equipped with emergency response capacity, supporting affected individuals, families, and communities to prepare, respond, and recover from disasters. Although social workers have historically been engaged in emergency response, social work curriculum and professional training remain slow to adapt, jeopardizing their capacity to support the vulnerable and marginalized populations, who have always been disproportionately affected by extreme events. In response to this deficit, this article utilizes a critical reflection approach to examine three social workers’ (a senior faculty, a junior faculty, and a social work student) interventions and challenges in their emergency response to persons experiencing homelessness (PEHs) during the first two waves of COVID-19 in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada (March 2020 to March 2021). The cross-career-stage reflections and analyses exhibit these three social workers’ COVID-19-specific emergency response efforts: a top-down advocacy effort for social development and policy, a bottom-up cognitive effort to comprehend the community’s dynamics, and a disaster-driven self-care effort. These three types of effort demonstrate a greater need for social work education and professional training, to develop more disaster-specific components to contribute to building the emergency response capacity of the next generation of social workers through in-classroom pedagogical enhancement and on-site field education training, better supporting PEHs and other vulnerable and marginalized groups living in the diverse context of extreme events in Canada and internationally.
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spelling pubmed-95666312022-10-15 Building Emergency Response Capacity: Multi-Career-Stage Social Workers’ Engagement with Homeless Sector during the First Two Waves of COVID-19 in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada Wu, Haorui Karabanow, Jeff Hoddinott, Tonya Int J Environ Res Public Health Communication The dramatic increase of global extreme events (e.g., natural, technological, and willful hazards) propels social workers to be equipped with emergency response capacity, supporting affected individuals, families, and communities to prepare, respond, and recover from disasters. Although social workers have historically been engaged in emergency response, social work curriculum and professional training remain slow to adapt, jeopardizing their capacity to support the vulnerable and marginalized populations, who have always been disproportionately affected by extreme events. In response to this deficit, this article utilizes a critical reflection approach to examine three social workers’ (a senior faculty, a junior faculty, and a social work student) interventions and challenges in their emergency response to persons experiencing homelessness (PEHs) during the first two waves of COVID-19 in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada (March 2020 to March 2021). The cross-career-stage reflections and analyses exhibit these three social workers’ COVID-19-specific emergency response efforts: a top-down advocacy effort for social development and policy, a bottom-up cognitive effort to comprehend the community’s dynamics, and a disaster-driven self-care effort. These three types of effort demonstrate a greater need for social work education and professional training, to develop more disaster-specific components to contribute to building the emergency response capacity of the next generation of social workers through in-classroom pedagogical enhancement and on-site field education training, better supporting PEHs and other vulnerable and marginalized groups living in the diverse context of extreme events in Canada and internationally. MDPI 2022-10-05 /pmc/articles/PMC9566631/ /pubmed/36232013 http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/ijerph191912713 Text en © 2022 by the authors. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).
spellingShingle Communication
Wu, Haorui
Karabanow, Jeff
Hoddinott, Tonya
Building Emergency Response Capacity: Multi-Career-Stage Social Workers’ Engagement with Homeless Sector during the First Two Waves of COVID-19 in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada
title Building Emergency Response Capacity: Multi-Career-Stage Social Workers’ Engagement with Homeless Sector during the First Two Waves of COVID-19 in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada
title_full Building Emergency Response Capacity: Multi-Career-Stage Social Workers’ Engagement with Homeless Sector during the First Two Waves of COVID-19 in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada
title_fullStr Building Emergency Response Capacity: Multi-Career-Stage Social Workers’ Engagement with Homeless Sector during the First Two Waves of COVID-19 in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada
title_full_unstemmed Building Emergency Response Capacity: Multi-Career-Stage Social Workers’ Engagement with Homeless Sector during the First Two Waves of COVID-19 in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada
title_short Building Emergency Response Capacity: Multi-Career-Stage Social Workers’ Engagement with Homeless Sector during the First Two Waves of COVID-19 in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada
title_sort building emergency response capacity: multi-career-stage social workers’ engagement with homeless sector during the first two waves of covid-19 in halifax, nova scotia, canada
topic Communication
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9566631/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/36232013
http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/ijerph191912713
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