Aging and Emotional Well-Being After Disasters: Vulnerability and Resilience.

Background And Objectives: Climate change threatens well-being and has increased the prevalence of weather-related disasters. We investigated age differences in emotional well-being among adults who had experienced hurricane-related, unavoidable stressors. Socioemotional selectivity theory (SST) posits that age-related motivational shifts buffer older adults against psychological distress, whereas the strength and vulnerability integration model (SAVI) posits that unavoidable stressors are more detrimental to older adults' well-being compared to younger adults.

Perceived Need for Mental Health Treatment and the Mental Health Response to the COVID-19 Pandemic in the United States.

: Population-based information on the extent of perceived need for mental health treatment and clinically significant psychological distress can help inform strategies for responding to the mental health impact of the COVID-19 pandemic.: A representative sample of U.S.

Nationally Representative Sample Shows an Increase in Domestic Conflict Early in the COVID-19 Pandemic.

Objective: The coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic and associated social distancing increased stressors related to risk for domestic conflict, but increases in domestic conflict early in the pandemic have yet to be studied in community samples.

Methods: Increase in domestic conflict (verbal or physical fights) since the beginning of the pandemic was assessed in 1196 partnered and cohabitating respondents, drawn from a nationally representative sample, in May 2020. Chi-square tests and logistic regression analyses were used to estimate associations of demographic characteristics and financial worry with domestic conflict.

A longitudinal study of psychological distress in the United States before and during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The COVID-19 pandemic has caused financial stress and disrupted daily life more quickly than any prior economic downturn and on a scale beyond any prior natural disaster. This study aimed to assess the impact of the pandemic on psychological distress and identify vulnerable groups using longitudinal data to account for pre-pandemic mental health status. Clinically significant psychological distress was assessed with the Kessler-6 in a national probability sample of adults in the United States at two time points, February 2019 (T1) and May 2020 (T2).

Framework for a Community Health Observing System for the Gulf of Mexico Region: Preparing for Future Disasters.

The Gulf of Mexico (GoM) region is prone to disasters, including recurrent oil spills, hurricanes, floods, industrial accidents, harmful algal blooms, and the current COVID-19 pandemic. The GoM and other regions of the U.S.

From Awareness to Action: Accounting for Infrastructure Interdependencies in Disaster Response and Recovery Planning.

This paper highlights challenges and open questions pertaining to physical and social infrastructure system interdependencies and their implications for disaster response, recovery, and resilience planning efforts. We describe the importance of understanding interdependencies in disaster contexts and highlight limitations to existing approaches. Suggestions for understanding and addressing interdependencies focus on increasing availability of tools for assessing interdependencies and increasing stakeholder and decisionmaker uptake of infrastructure interdependency-related information in planning efforts.

Emerging infectious disease, the household built environment characteristics, and urban planning: Evidence on avian influenza in Vietnam.

Recent concerns with pandemic outbreaks of human disease and their origins in animal populations have ignited concerns regarding connections between Emerging Infectious Diseases (EID) and development. As disasters, health, and infectious disease become part of planning concern (Matthew & McDonald, 2007), greater focus on household infrastructure and EID disease outbreaks among poultry is warranted. Following Spencer (2013), this study examines the relationship between the mix of household-scale water supplies, sanitation systems, and construction materials, and Highly Pathogenic Avian Influenza (HPAI) among poultry in a developing country: Vietnam.

Short-Term Solutions to a Long-Term Challenge: Rethinking Disaster Recovery Planning to Reduce Vulnerabilities and Inequities.

In the immediate aftermath of disaster, governments usually act quickly to reduce risk and to recover their communities' socio-economic functioning. Policy makers in these situations need-but may not have the capacity or time for-substantial analysis and public debate about how to balance short- and long-term societal needs. Inadequate attention to this challenge may result in a deepening of the inequities that increase vulnerability to disaster impacts.

Persistent Risk-Related Worry as a Function of Recalled Exposure to the Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill and Prior Trauma.

Large oil spills are disasters associated with psychological effects for exposed communities. The amount of worry that individuals experience after a disaster may be influenced by many factors, such as the type and extent of exposure to disaster impacts, prior trauma, and sociodemographic characteristics. This study examined the nature and predictors of worry about ongoing impacts of the 2010 Deepwater Horizon (DH) oil spill reported by Gulf of Mexico coastal residents.

On the Need for Prospective Disaster Survey Panels.

Disasters are typically unforeseen, causing most social and behavioral studies about disasters to be reactive. Occasionally, predisaster data are available, for example, when disasters happen while a study is already in progress or where data collected for other purposes already exist, but planned pre-post designs are all but nonexistent. This gap fundamentally limits the quantification of disasters' human toll.

Reaching vulnerable populations in the disaster-prone US Gulf Coast: Communicating across the crisis lifecycle.

Delivering risk and crisis communication to US Gulf Coast residents poses a unique challenge to individual and organizational responders. The region has endured several natural and man-made disasters, spanning Hurricane Katrina, the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, and more recently Hurricanes Harvey and Irma. In the future, the US Gulf Coast is expected to remain susceptible to a range of disasters.

Reaching vulnerable populations in the disaster-prone US Gulf Coast: Communicating across the crisis lifecycle.

Delivering risk and crisis communication to US Gulf Coast residents poses a unique challenge to individual and organizational responders. The region has endured several natural and man-made disasters, spanning Hurricane Katrina, the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, and more recently Hurricanes Harvey and Irma. In the future, the US Gulf Coast is expected to remain susceptible to a range of disasters.

Exposure to the Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill, Associated Resource Loss, and Long-Term Mental and Behavioral Outcomes.

Objective: The aim of this study was to (1) assess the long-term mental and behavioral health outcomes of the Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill of residents in the Gulf Coast and to (2) identify populations that may be particularly vulnerable to future disasters.

Methods: The Survey of Trauma, Resilience, and Opportunity in Neighborhoods in the Gulf (STRONG) is a population-representative sample of 2520 coastal residents surveyed in Texas, Louisiana, Alabama, Mississippi, and Florida in 2016. We present prevalence estimates for positive screens of depression, anxiety, and alcohol misuse, as well as receipt of health care services.

What Words Convey: The Potential for Patient Narratives to Inform Quality Improvement.

Unlabelled: Policy Points Narratives about patients' experiences with outpatient care are essential for quality improvement because they convey ample actionable information that both elaborates on existing domains within patient experience surveys and describes multiple additional domains that are important to patients. The content of narrative feedback from patients can potentially be translated to improved quality in multiple ways: clinicians can learn from their own patients, groups of clinicians can learn from the experience of their peers' patients, and health system administrators can identify and respond to patterns in patients' accounts that reflect systemic challenges to quality. Consistent investment by payers and providers is required to ensure that patient narratives are rigorously collected, analyzed fully, and effectively used for quality improvement.

Americans' Growing Exposure To Clinician Quality Information: Insights And Implications.

For two decades, various initiatives have encouraged Americans to consider quality when choosing clinicians, both to enhance informed choice and to reduce disparities in access to high-quality providers. The literature portrays these efforts as largely ineffective. But this depiction overlooks two factors: the dramatic expansion since 2010 in the availability of patients' narratives about care and the growth of information seeking among consumers.

Improving Patients' Choice of Clinician by Including Roll-up Measures in Public Healthcare Quality Reports: an Online Experiment.

Background: Public reports on healthcare quality typically include complex data. To lower the cognitive burden of interpreting these data, some report designers create summary, or roll-up, measures combining multiple indicators of quality into one score. Little is known about how the availability of roll-ups affects clinician choice.

A Rigorous Approach to Large-Scale Elicitation and Analysis of Patient Narratives.

Patient narratives have emerged as promising vehicles for making health care more responsive by helping clinicians to better understand their patients' expectations, perceptions, or concerns and encouraging consumers to engage with information about quality. A growing number of websites incorporate patients' comments. But existing comments have fragmentary content, fail to represent less vocal patients, and can be manipulated to "manage" providers' reputations.

Choosing Doctors Wisely: Can Assisted Choice Enhance Patients' Selection of Clinicians?

We conducted a simulated clinician-choice experiment, comparing choices and decision-making processes of participants ( = 688) randomized among four experimental arms: a conventional website reporting only quantitative performance information, a website reporting both qualitative (patient comments) and quantitative information, the second website augmented by a decision aid (labeling of patient comments), and the decision-aided website further augmented by the presence of a trained navigator. Introducing patient comments enhanced engagement with the quality information but led to a decline in decision quality, particularly the consistency of choices with consumers' stated preferences. Labeling comments helped erase the decline in decision quality, although the highest percentage of preference-congruent choices was seen in the navigator arm.

Using "roll-up" measures in healthcare quality reports: perspectives of report sponsors and national alliances.

Objectives: To understand the views of prominent organizations in the field of healthcare quality on the topic of reporting roll-up measures that combine indicators of multiple, often disparate, dimensions of care to consumers.

Study Design: This study used a semi-structured, qualitative interview design.

Methods: We conducted 30- to 60-minute semi-structured telephone interviews with representatives of 10 organizations that sponsor public healthcare quality reports and 3 national alliances representing multiple stakeholder groups.

CAHPS and Comments: How Closed-Ended Survey Questions and Narrative Accounts Interact in the Assessment of Patient Experience.

Objectives: To investigate whether content from patient narratives explains variation in patients' primary care provider (PCP) ratings beyond information from the closed-ended questions of the Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems (CAHPS) Clinician and Group Survey and whether the relative placement of closed- and open-ended survey questions affects either the content of narratives or the CAHPS composite scores.

Methods: Members of a standing Internet panel (N = 332) were randomly assigned to complete a CAHPS survey that was either preceded or followed by a set of open-ended questions about how well their PCP meets their expectations and how they relate to their PCP.

Results: Narrative content from healthier patients explained only an additional 2% beyond the variation in provider ratings explained by CAHPS composite measures.

Perceived Risk of Avian Influenza and Urbanization in Northern Vietnam.

Highly pathogenic avian influenza (HPAI) is an important public health concern because of potential for widespread morbidity and mortality in humans and poultry and associated devastating economic losses. We examined how perceptions of the risk of HPAI in poultry vary across communes/wards in the north of Vietnam at different levels of urbanization (rural, peri-urban, urban). Analyses of questionnaire responses from 1081 poultry raisers suggested that the perceived risk of HPAI in poultry was highest in peri-urban and rural settings.

Breaking Narrative Ground: Innovative Methods for Rigorously Eliciting and Assessing Patient Narratives.

Objective: To design a methodology for rigorously eliciting narratives about patients' experiences with clinical care that is potentially useful for public reporting and quality improvement.

Data Sources/study Setting: Two rounds of experimental data (N = 48 each) collected in 2013-2014, using a nationally representative Internet panel.

Study Design: Our study (1) articulates and operationalizes criteria for assessing narrative elicitation protocols; (2) establishes a "gold standard" for assessment of such protocols; and (3) creates and tests a protocol for narratives about outpatient treatment experiences.

Evidence for the Convergence Model: The Emergence of Highly Pathogenic Avian Influenza (H5N1) in Viet Nam.

Building on a series of ground breaking reviews that first defined and drew attention to emerging infectious diseases (EID), the 'convergence model' was proposed to explain the multifactorial causality of disease emergence. The model broadly hypothesizes disease emergence is driven by the co-incidence of genetic, physical environmental, ecological, and social factors. We developed and tested a model of the emergence of highly pathogenic avian influenza (HPAI) H5N1 based on suspected convergence factors that are mainly associated with land-use change.