No abstract

Carlisle in northwest England suffered its worse floods for more than 180 years in 2005. A study, reported here, was undertaken to assess the health and social impacts of these floods via in-depth, taped individual and focus-group interviews with people whose homes had been flooded and with agency workers who helped them. Respondents spoke of physical health ailments, psychological stress, water health-and-safety issues related to the floods, and disputes with insurance and construction companies, which they felt had caused and exacerbated psychological health problems. Support workers also suffered from psychological stress. Furthermore, it was found that people had low expectations of a flood and were not prepared. The findings are presented in five sections covering flood risk awareness, water contamination issues, physical health, mental health, and impact on frontline support workers. The discussion focuses on the implications of the findings for policy and practice vis-à-vis psychological health provision, contamination issues, training and support for frontline support workers, matters relating to restoration, and preparation for flooding.

No abstract

Major flood events almost inevitably affect education and are likely to have a lasting impact on a school and community. In this paper, based on interviews with head teachers carried out in Hull during December 2008, we focus on the 2007 flood event in Hull and the way this affected schools and pupils in the city. The paper indicates the importance of reintegrating children (and families) into community structures such as schools as soon as possible after the flood and of creating safe spaces (‘circle time’) within the school classroom for pupils to explore their flood experiences. While we have commented on the potential therapeutic value of circle time in a post‐disaster situation, we acknowledge that more research is required.

Investigation of the medium-term outcomes of clinical audit projects has provided an insight into what might usefully be termed the process of completing the audit cycle. The time-scales required to reach the point at which action is deemed to have been implemented or not may be as long as 3 years. Conceptualizing the action stage of the cycle as a single discrete event fails to do justice to the complexity of the process, and attributing the implementation of change in clinical settings to single causes such as individual audit projects is problematic.