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Background: Canadian Red Cross provides national snapshot of emergency management services to high risk populations

Hit harder and served less... study shows high-risk populations need special consideration in disasters

Whether it's hurricanes on the East coast, ice storms in Quebec and Ontario or floods in Manitoba, disasters do not hit all Canadians equally. And experience has shown all disasters have a greater impact on the most high-risk populations in our society, seniors, aboriginals, new immigrants, low income earners and the homeless to name a few. This reality has challenged Canada's emergency management system and is causing changes in the traditional one-size-fits-all approach to disaster response.

To understand the needs of high-risk populations and their requirement for special consideration in emergency planning, a report on Integrating Emergency Management and High Risk Populations was released in 2008. Headed by the Canadian Red Cross with financial contributions from Public Safety Canada and the Public Health Agency Canada, the report outlined a nation-wide snapshot of the disaster management system.

The Canadian Red Cross partnered with the research team at the Department of Applied Disaster and Emergency Studies at Brandon University and surveyed 137 organizations across Canada; 48 were mainstream emergency management organizations while 89 were organizations representing a variety of high-risk populations from the disability, senior, children and youth, medical dependency, mental health, aboriginal and low income sectors. The Data was analyzed to locate the gaps in service and the barriers hampering the integration of Canada's high-risk populations into emergency management systems.

The study, released in January 2008, identified six major findings:

1. Tremendous gaps exist in the service to Canada's most at-risk populations.
2. Emergency management organizations need to further integrate high-risk populations into their core activities.
3. Most organizations serving high-risk populations consider disaster response to be part of their mandate but lack the resources to implement actions.
4. Voluntary Sector organizations serving high-risk populations are unable to increase their efforts in emergency preparedness and service continuity due to financial and human resource limitations.
5. Many organizations serving high-risk populations are unprepared for disaster.
6. Emergency management organizations and high-risk organizations need to be more integrated.

According to Don Shropshire, National Director of Disaster Management for the Canadian Red Cross, the research from the study helped pinpoint the actions required to plug those gaps. "It shows us how vital a role the voluntary sector plays in disaster response," says Shropshire. "There needs to be more resources put into high-risk organizations striving to increase their disaster resiliency and more outreach by emergency management organizations to integrate high-risk populations into the circle of response."

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