Scientific Journal of Rescue Relief
Volume:11 Issue: 3, Summer 2019

Maintaining the mental health of relief workers requires improving their psychological abilities. The present study is carried out with the aim to identify the components affecting the psychological empowerment of the relief workers and to construct a tool appropriate to the psychological requirements and characteristics of the relief activities to measure the components of the occupational psychological empowerment among them.

This was an applied study performed with quantitative and qualitative methods (Mixed Method) in different stages in accordance with the study objective.

In this study, 351 relief workers cooperated with an average age of 28.56 and standard deviation 8.13. The findings from the completion of questionnaires confirmed the six factors of resilience, self-management, psychological hardiness, problem-solving ability, decision-making, and emotional intelligence (EI) on the researcher-made scale. The most important factor in this study was the resilience factor with the greatest impact on the job psychological empowerment of the relief workers.

Based on the results of the study, in order to reduce the pressures and stresses of relief in disasters on the relief workers and prevent them from becoming more severe psychological problems, special counseling and psychological support services should be provided to increase their resilience. In addition, the tool developed can be applied to measure the occupational psychological empowerment in volunteers, relief workers, and rescuers. Moreover, based on the scores obtained by the subjects in the scale, it can be considered as a criterion to accept or reject individuals in entering the relief activities. Furthermore, for the individuals accepted according to the characteristics of relief activities, planning can be made and training courses and workshops can be held to teach, empower, and strengthen them and enhance the components of psychological empowerment among them.

Medical centers are directly involved in health of the individual and society and quick and cheap access to these centers in urban communities is of great importance. In providing urban services, considering some principles, including the principles of passive defense in structures, increases the efficiency of the urban system in the area of provision of better services to citizens and also the development of a sustainable city. This study aims to address the spatial analysis of medical centers in Omidiyeh City, Iran, based on the passive defense principles.

The present study was applied in terms of purpose and descriptive-analytical in terms of nature and method. The data collection method included the library and survey studies. The technique used in the analysis was also the analytic hierarchy process (AHP) based on the experts’ opinion and a pairwise comparison between the indicators in the geographic information system (GIS).

Combining the layers of population density, land use, communication network, medical centers, distance from industrial centers, and distance from fire stations as well as creating the final map, a suitable area for medical centers was identified.

The study findings indicated that the distribution pattern of the health centers in Omidiyeh is not in accordance with the principles and criteria of passive defense and the establishment of new urban medical centers using the GIS capabilities in the city can be useful in providing services to citizens.

Staff of medical centers, who are saviors of accident victims, face risks at work that may even lose their lives. Although different criteria have been used in different studies, the performance of medical centers in terms of health, safety, and environment (HSE) management has not been evaluated. Therefore, the extraction, grouping, and prioritization of the HSE management assessment criteria of medical centers were performed in the present study.

Using the systematic method, following examining the most important methods, the criteria and sub-criteria associated with the HSE management of the medical centers were extracted, grouped and prioritized using the opinions of experts. The entropy method was employed to analyze the criteria.

Total of 33 criteria and 166 sub-criteria were extracted which from them the criteria of operation control, risk management, and resource management had the highest repetition in the performance assessment methods. Finally, the cases were classified in 13 criteria and 35
sub-criteria, and the criteria of strategic management and compliance with laws and regulations were of the highest importance from the viewpoint of the study experts.

The investigation on different methods showed that the criteria used did not cover all of important issues (such as strategy, goals and programs, resource allocation, evaluation of stakeholder needs, and selection of suppliers from the perspective of HSE management). The results provide a good ground for introducing and developing criteria for evaluating the HSE management of medical centers to improve the performance and compare different centers.

One of the main weaknesses and problems in the field of road accident management is the lack or non-use of appropriate information systems. The overall aim of this study is to reduce the impact of road accidents in the west, southwest, and south routes of Tehran Province, Iran, by designing Management Database responsible for road accidents.

This was an applied study performed using the descriptive-analytical method in which the data entry and analysis were conducted in the Geographic Information System (GIS) environment in line with the objectives. Then, according to different requirements of the various users, an appropriate analysis was performed on the layers and the software spatial analysis was applied in line with the main objective of the study. In the next step, the desired outputs were extracted from the system and the main output, i.e. the comprehensive database of spatial data required to manage road accidents, was provided to the management levels of various organizations for planning.

In this study, the accident-prone areas in the studied routes were identified using the kernel density estimation (KDE) method.

Performing various analyses on geographical and descriptive information and providing appropriate outputs and also sharing them can play an effective role in reducing injuries caused by road accidents.

Fires in residential buildings, commercial complexes, and small and large industries cause a lot of financial, human, and environmental damage in different communities annually. This study is conducted with the aim to evaluate the fire risk in the selected commercial buildings in Mashhad, Iran.

This was a descriptive-cross-sectional and applied study conducted in the spring of 2019 on 10 separate commercial buildings in Mashhad. First, the necessary checklists for fire risk assessment from the NFPA 101 standard were prepared and compiled by the researcher, and the necessary information was completed according to the field surveys and obtaining the urban planning documents of the buildings. The information collected was then analyzed in the Computerized Fire Safety Evaluation System (CFSES) software for final evaluation of the buildings.

In general, the total number of commercial buildings examined (10 cases) was in an unacceptable condition in all three areas of fire risk, including the fire control, exit, and general safety aspects. In addition, the fire risk situation in older buildings (5 cases) was worse than in new buildings (5 cases).

The fire risk assessment score of the commercial buildings studied in terms of fire control, exit route, and general safety aspects was unacceptable and none of the buildings evaluated obtained the minimum safety score in these three aspects. Therefore, to improve fire safety in commercial buildings, valid fire safety regulations and standards, including NFPA 101, must be observed to prevent fire accidents and irreparable financial and human losses.

In times of crisis, the timely transfer of the injured to medical facilities is one of the most important stages of relief and one of the most widely used methods to achieve the transfer point designing goal. The transfer point in literature is a place to collect and transfer the optimal demand for a particular service. For example, in times of natural disasters such as earthquakes, the injured (customers) are transferred by ambulance to the transfer points and then by helicopter to the hospital (facility).

In this study, two single-objective and double-objective complex integer number programming models were presented for the problem of locating transfer points and optimal allocation to facilities, taking into account the limitations in facility capacity and transfer points as well as assuming two types of normal and bad injuries.

In the single-objective model, the reduction in the time of sending the injured in the relief chain, and in the double objective model, in addition to the previous goal, the reduction of the fine for not sending the injured were examined. It is only possible to transfer each injured person to the hospital using the transfer points, and the treatment of the normally injured individuals is performed at the transfer points. The models were solved with two approaches, mild and severe. In order to show the efficiency of the proposed models, a case study was conducted in districts 10, 11, and 17 of Tehran metropolis, Iran.

Setting up transfer points has a great impact on speeding up the process of providing services to the injured. Additionally, given the disproportionality of the number of injured with the capacity of hospitals in severe crises, it is necessary to anticipate transfer points to manage relief and respond to all injured.

The impact of disasters on the mental and physical health of affected communities requires planning for socio-psychological recovery, recognizing various dimensions, and research on the arising issues. The present study is conducted with the aim to focus on methodological and subject research approaches in international post-disaster studies in the framework of research design, target society, and measurement of key structures, in order to identify existing research gaps in this field.

In the present study, a purposeful post-disaster content analysis was performed quantitatively and qualitatively on socio-psychological studies in 39 journals indexed in databases. After the purposeful and specific steps, 73 studies were coded in an accurate review process, and then the codes extracted (research strategies, research project implementation, highlighted topics, sampling method, statistical population, and data collection tools) were analyzed in Excel software and presented in the form of descriptive statistics.

Cross-sectional studies with quantitative strategy, random sampling method, standardized structured questionnaire, and large statistical population have the highest frequency. The predominant subjects studied on an individual scale were the individual post-disaster psychological consequences and on a collective scale were indicators associated with socio-psychological recovery.

The imbalance in the socio-psychological studies of disasters and the recovery indicators in both individual and collective scales require paying attention to the subjects related to the individual recovery and mental health and a deeper understanding of the socio-psychological consequences of disasters. In addition to the current research approaches, the investigations on the post-traumatic neuroscience will be growing in the future perspective. Expanding the scope of quantitative research and neuroscience requires standardized measurement scales in developing countries. The reliability of the study findings was 71.5%.

Sustainable urban development and sustainable cities are the most important challenges faced by humans in the 21st century, as the cities may suffer a lot of damage in times of crisis. Therefore, paying attention to the passive defense subject can significantly reduce the level of damage caused by disasters. The present study is conducted with the aim to provide a passive defense approach to selecting the best shelter for temporary accommodation.

This was a descriptive-analytical study in which the required information was collected using library and field methods. In order to analyze the information, the analytic network process (ANP) technique was employed in order to determine the importance coefficients of indicators in a real environment. Finally, by overlapping information layers, the most preferred locations were identified in proportion to the objective, and the system was used to draw the layers and determine the importance weights of the indicators.

Given the importance weights, the characteristics of a suitable place included areas with sufficient open spaces and at the same time, compatible with the surrounding uses with a relatively higher potential for the establishment of the injured. Therefore, due to the existence of open and suitable spaces as well as proper access, the outskirts of Tabriz, Iran, have a high capacity for accommodating the incident victims.

Combining different layers of effective uses, the final map of the optimal spaces for the construction of urban shelters was obtained dividing the areas in five categories of very good to very weak, and eight appropriate locations were specified. The adaptability of uses, distance from densely populated areas, parks and green spaces, and access to main passages obtained the highest scores for temporary accommodation