Photo by Will Owens

Royster Fellow Tasanee Ross-Sheriff worked with a team of public health and social work faculty and students to produce a training CD that will help social workers respond better to the next disaster that strikes America.

Thinking Ahead of the Storm

The devastation of Hurricane Katrina was a wake-up call that revealed serious problems with disaster planning and preparedness in the United States. Social work doctoral student and Royster Fellow Tasanee Ross-Sheriff is working with a team of social work and public health students to improve the response should another disaster strike.

The team, working through the Behavioral Healthcare Resource Program at the School of Social Work and the North Carolina Center for Public Health Preparedness at the School of Public Health, is developing a series of interactive CD-ROMs that train public health social workers to deal with the challenges they could confront. A hurricane preparedness training CD has been distributed to thousands of social workers and agencies across the country, and the team is currently working on a CD dealing with bioterrorism.

Ross-Sheriff has a wealth of international experience that is relevant to helping disaster victims. She lived and worked for four months in a refugee camp in Kenya, studied HIV/AIDs awareness among adolescents in Ghana and helped evaluate a program for land-mine survivors in El Salvador. In a conversation with The Fountain’s Erik Holmes, Ross-Sheriff discusses disaster preparedness in the United States and how we can be ready the next time around.

The Fountain: What does the experience of Hurricane Katrina tell us about the state of preparedness for disasters in America?

Tasanee Ross-Sheriff (TRS): I think it shows that our system needs more work in developing preparedness plans and being ready to implement them should the need arise. The coordination at all levels — from FEMA and state governments all the way down to local organizations — needs to be streamlined and have better communication.

A lot more attention needs to go into preparedness and prevention. The challenge is that in the United States a lot of emphasis is on how to fix it once it’s broken and less so on thinking about how to prevent it. The attitude needs to be, “We are ready when this happens,’ instead of, ‘Let’s not think about this until it happens.”

Fountain: What are you as a social work student doing to change that?

TRS: We’ve been creating multimedia training CDs that are for public health social workers individually and those in agencies that want to start thinking about how they and their agencies can prepare. If there is another hurricane or other incident, do they know who to contact? Do they know who all the players are? It really gets them thinking about those pieces.

You have this vignette that simulates the immediate impact and intermediate and long-term effects of the disaster. The scenario plays out in the CD where the social worker goes into this virtual town and clicks on buildings like hospitals and nursing homes and schools and learns what the issues are and what resources they need. It’s very holistic. As they go through the training they can type in their responses and then print them out and share with coworkers. It really helps identify what those missing pieces are so they can try to address them before anything happens.

There’s a team of us from the social work and public health schools that develops the CDs from the bare-bones concept at the beginning all the way to the finished product. It’s been really neat to not just be involved in one piece of it, but to be involved throughout the entire process.

Fountain: Why are social workers so important in responding to disasters?

TRS: Social workers are really the first line of defense, and they need to come to the forefront of the interagency response to disasters. And as you can see from Katrina, management of response resources could be conducted better. Social workers need to be aware of what their capacity is and in what ways they can contribute. They need to know how they can plug into what’s going on so they remain involved and utilized effectively.

There are a lot of social workers who do what we call emotional first aid, like the people who went to New York to help victims after 9-11. But there are also a lot of people working on the management end who can help coordinate those huge teams of workers and volunteers and can respond by helping coordinate interagency efforts. They’re a huge resource that needs to be better plugged into the system and educated more about how they can contribute.

Fountain: How is your past work with international refugees related to the experiences of people displaced by Hurricane Katrina?

TRS: It’s hugely applicable because it’s working with people who have been uprooted from their homes, from their communities, from their social support networks. They need help figuring out how to communicate and find people who are missing, and eventually how to get back to a sense of normalcy. With the international refugee experience, I’ve learned that it’s not an immediate process and it may take time to deal with these things.

Fountain: Do you have a mentor in the School of Social Work who has made an impact on you?

TRS: Dr. Kathleen Rounds has been just phenomenal. She’s such a great mentor who challenges you but doesn’t micromanage. It’s that nice balance between the two. She’s very supportive, and she’s been an incredible resource. She really helps me try to think of how I can do things I’m passionate about and still get through the program. I feel very confident that I won’t have to sacrifice what I’m passionate about.

Fountain: How has the Caroline H. and Thomas S. Royster Jr. Fellowship affected your work?

TRS: It’s really helped me with getting plugged in with other doctoral students across the campus and hearing what their experiences have been. As a doctoral student you can very easily get absorbed in your own world, and having that interaction widens my perspective. Having the funding gives me peace of mind that I’m not going to struggle financially, which allows me to pursue projects that are of interest and not just where the funding is. It keeps those doors open.

© 2006, The Graduate School, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
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