Co-creation and visualization of care for disaster risk reduction

Abstract

This paper summarizes “care” for disaster risk reduction, or “gensai care” in Japanese, through the example of cultural nursing from the perspective of native residents as well as disaster response nurses. Based on disaster nursing, primary health care in communities has the potential to visualize health care needs, assess living environment, identify high-risk populations, help restore public health in post-disaster conditions, and communicate with concerned local authorities. As self-care, gaining literacy in disaster risk reduction requires greater human behavioral consideration on how people interpret and live with risk, and how individuals' perception, knowledge, and attitude can put them in vulnerable situations. In such chaotic situations, chronology and geospatial information technologies could be an epidemiological approach for community nursing to very early case finding in more efficient manners. On the other hand, high-context communication is very important in Japan. During the chaos at disaster sites, meaning should best be conveyed through implicit contexts, including social customs, silence, nuance, or tone of voice in a native context. One of the gaps in “care” during disasters is the inclusion of vulnerability and the visualization of unpaid care for making effective decisions and providing policy recommendations. This requires collaboration between a native implicit or explicit communicator and decision makers to visualize appropriate environmental data, utilizing data to address disaster-related health issues and making information available to the public through processed and opened data from miscellaneous information. In order to put it into practice, both nurses and local communities should consider bringing “emic thinking” into the “etic approach” to the chaotic cultural situation of a disaster.