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The purpose of this paper is to analyze the decision-making process and provide a decision support framework for deployment of an on-site analytical capacity (a fieldable laboratory (FL)) to contain an expanding outbreak and protect public health.

The FL mission cycle consists of five successive interlinked phases with a set of operational functions (OFs) performed during the mission. The list of phases, OFs and their contents were iteratively developed during and after FL missions and validated with operational partners.

The well-defined structure of the FL domain appears as the best functional basis for tracking the decision-making process across the whole mission cycle. Description of all the FL elements and information flows addresses the major issue of interoperability of resources used by similar international capacities (inter-)acting as operational partners in global response to the crisis.

The work presents the first attempt in this field to systematically describe and chronologically organize the decisions taken by a FL manager and staff during all phases of the FL mission cycle. Definition of OFs with all the related information flows allows for comparison of procedures, their better planning and refining, validation of protocols, mutual training and operational improvement between FLs from different geographical, organizational and cultural origins.

COVID-19 has affected most business activities, including technology-based business. The higher the business vulnerability rating, the greater the impacts. After identifying three dimensions of vulnerability (exposure, business sensitivity and response capacity), this study aims to determine the potential components and indicators of the vulnerability of technology-based businesses.

Using the indicator approach, a comprehensive vulnerability model was developed for assessing the vulnerability of the technology-based business against COVID-19.

In this study, COVID-19, as a biological threat and an exogenous shock, was considered the exposure dimension. Business characteristics, job characteristics, business owner-manager demographics, product and supplier characteristics were identified as the sensitivity dimension, while resources, human capital, technological capitals, social capitals, institutional capitals, infrastructures, management capacity and supply chain capabilities were defined as the adaptive business capability or response capacity. To determine vulnerability and response capacity against exogenous shocks and a pandemic crisis, the framework can act as a useful checklist for managers and owners of technology-based businesses.

Research on the COVID-19, especially in the technology-based business, is still at the emergent stage. This study is a pioneering effort to review the literature on business vulnerability and provide a framework to reduce business vulnerability using the indicator-based approach.

Critical analyses of health policies and practices may appear to lack practicality during unprecedented times that demand immediate solutions. This paper aims to use critical social science theories to help improve essential service delivery during a public health crisis.

This study is based on qualitative content analysis of government and scholarly sources between 2008 and 2021 to identify strengths and gaps underlying the Canadian Federal Government’s evidence-based solutions to the opioid death crisis. Key questions examined are: What constitutes best-evidence practices underlying the Canadian Drugs and Substances Strategy?, Is biomedical evidence the only legitimate framework to substantiate feasible interventions? and Because the opioid death crisis affects disproportionately vulnerable populations, what is the potential merit of considering diverse knowledges and practices as valid forms of intervention despite lacking biomedical evidence bases?

While overdose reversing drugs, drug replacement approaches, biologically focused harm reduction options and pharmacological regulatory and surveillance initiatives help reduce premature opioid-related morbidity and mortality across provinces, this study’s findings demonstrate that these individualizing, biomedical magic bullets are temporary solutions, not comprehensive plans to solve a societal problem. This study’s theoretically informed analysis shows that the Canadian Federal Government responses detract attention from issues of social justice, social inequities and the biomedical dominance of health care as broader forces of the opioid death crisis. To address these analytical omissions, broader evidence-based solutions must build upon meaningful intraventions, the insiders’ perspectives or voices of the afflicted communities alongside meaningful interventions – going beyond distal, clinical-based and proximal, home-based interventions.

By highlighting the biomedical and social embeddings of the opioid death crisis, this study underscores structural conditions rather than individuals’ physical bodies as the catalysts for change. A deeper theoretical understanding of why certain issues exists, as they do and how they occur, can provide the basis for prediction of their (re)occurrence and for informing meaningful intervention efforts.

Can managers prepare their organisations for the unexpected and unforeseeable? The purpose of this paper is to argue that organisations that endure and survive a serious disruption to homeostasis may as a consequence be better equipped to survive further and more devastating attacks.

This hypothesis is based on a naturally occurring biological survival mechanism termed hormesis. Hormesis describes a controversial biological phenomenon where the organism overcompensates and adaptation occurs after exposure to low doses of toxins. Hormesis protects the organism against subsequent repeat exposure to more lethal doses.

Hormetic effects may occur in an organisation just as it does in a biological entity following exposure to a life‐threatening disruption, inoculating it against potentially more lethal recurrences. Disruption in an organisational context may include negative environmental impacts, incidences of management incompetence, or consequences of competitive hostilities. It is argued that lessons can be applied from examples of biological hormesis, particularly lessons related to the hormetic recovery stages of overcompensation and adaptation as part of an evolutionary survival mechanism for organisations.

Organisational hormesis may have the potential to produce growth and advancement that would not normally occur under ordinary circumstances. Hormesis demonstrates more than a step in an organisational learning process as it conveys an adaptive response designed to prevent future disruptions. Hormesis is a healing process with foresight, “designed” with the intent of increasing organisational fitness within a rapidly changing environment. It has been “designed” with the knowledge that the environment may yet dispense an even greater challenge, still to be met. In this respect the hormetic process defies evolutionary dogma which claims that evolutionary processes are blind that evolution can only react to and compensate for past pressure rather than being able to predict and prepare for future threats. After recovery from disruption, managers may, for cost cutting and other expedient purposes, cease recovery or restructuring activities. This action may unwittingly interfere with the hormetic overcompensation stage, thereby interfering with evolutionary adaptation processes. As a consequence, the organisation's ability to repel more severe disruptions may be compromised. Some firms are prematurely liquidated or downsized before they can develop hormetic response mechanisms. As demonstrated by the Xerox example, liquidation in 2000 would have been a catastrophic mistake.

Provides a post‐mortem examination searching for possible explanations for organisational phenomena that have as yet been adequately explained.

Although we have yet to experience a major bioterrorism event in the U.S., we are nevertheless preparing for such an event. In this paper, we consider the nature of bioterrorism and the threats and challenges it brings to managing health care organizations. Because existing managerial theory may be inadequate in responding to bioterrorism events, management scholars are advised to approach their research with a great deal of humility and openness. Inasmuch as emerging theoretical frameworks based on complexity science and chaos theory are not fully developed, we propose that stakeholder management theory may be the best approach at this juncture.

As a key component of the American health care system, the physician office could be the front line in a bioterrorist attack. Nationally and locally, the primary focus on this subject appears to be from a hospital preparedness and public health agency perspective, with little attention devoted to primary physician providers in their own offices, and those specialists to whom patients may be referred. While unrelated to bioterrorism, the recent SARS outbreak also brings to the forefront the need for physicians offices to be able to clinically, operationally, and managerially respond to illnesses that mirror the symptoms of known illnesses, but may be more virulent new organisms or hybrids of existing organisms. If the face of bioterrorism is subtle and slow in its presentation, physicians, in their own offices, could be the first providers of care. Will they be prepared, or will they be among the first fatalities in a bioterrorist attack?

This chapter reviews qualitative research on parenting children with disabilities published over the last 50 years to explore whether shifts in academic discourse and changes in professional training have affected research on parenting and/or the experiences of parents who are the subject of such research.

An extensive literature search was conducted, and 78 peer-reviewed, qualitative studies on the experience of parenting a child with a disability were included in the sample. Themes were extracted from the reviewed literature and compared across decades.

The findings of the present review suggest that some aspects of the parenting experience have changed very little. In particular, parents continue to experience negative reactions such as stress and anomie, especially early in their children’s lives, and socially imposed barriers such as unhelpful professionals, and a lack of needed services continue to create problems and inspire an entrepreneurial response. In addition, stigmatizing encounters with others continue to be a common occurrence. In contrast to earlier decades, studies conducted in more recent years have begun to use the social model of disability as an analytic frame and also increasingly report that parents are questioning and challenging the concept of “normal” itself.

Additional improvements are needed in professional education and services to reduce the negative reactions experienced by parents of children with disabilities.

The findings of this meta-analysis can serve as a guide to future research on parenting children with disabilities.

The purpose of this paper is to examine crisis management practices among gambling-related hospitality business stakeholders (GBSs) during the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic.

An online survey was administered to a sample of GBSs resulting in 64 completed surveys. The survey explored the COVID-19 crisis using a three-phase framework: preparedness (prior experience and response plans), response (level of importance and use of crisis practices) and future (confidence in recovery, beliefs about consumer behavior and new strategies). Independent-samples t-tests were conducted to investigate the influence of preparedness variables on crisis management capabilities. Importance-Performance Analysis was used to evaluate GBSs' crisis management capabilities and identify where performance might be improved. Factor analyses were employed to explore groupings of response practices as well as future strategies.

Prior experience had a significant impact on GBSs' crisis management. IPA indicated gaps between the importance GBSs assign to response practices and their corresponding level of use, specifically for those related to marketing and government. Factor analysis revealed response practices did not group according to the questionnaire's four themes, instead, three themes of marketing, efficiency and expenses were revealed. Prevention and hygiene emerged as dominant themes with respect to future strategies.

This is a timely study that investigates crisis management among GBSs during the COVID-19 pandemic. It provides important methodological contributions as well as valuable practical considerations for gambling-related hospitality businesses.

With the emergence of biological weapons of mass destruction as potential tools of terrorism, Presidential Decision Directive 39 initiated US plans to enhance mitigation and response activity. Anecdotal information suggests many of the likely behavioral and organizational response challenges are not being addressed. The current paper applies the disaster research literature to identify the likely behavioral and organizational response challenges a community or nation would encounter in a bio‐terrorist attack on a metropolitan area. Mitigation and response planning, it is argued, would be enhanced if these likely challenges were actually taken into account.

In response to a critical need for uniform school crisis preparedness and response efforts across districts, the National Association of School Psychologists developed PREPaRE, a model and training curriculum aimed to equip school-based professionals to engage in comprehensive school crisis prevention and intervention practices. The PREPaRE acronym stands for: Prevent/Prepare for psychological trauma; Reaffirm physical health, security, and safety; Evaluate psychological trauma; Provide interventions (and) Respond to psychological needs; and Examine the effectiveness of prevention and intervention efforts. The model spans four crisis preparedness phases: Prevention, Mitigation, Response, and Recovery. This chapter provides a detailed overview of the development and structure of the PREPaRE model's core components and the organizational framework of the Incident Command System. It delineates elements of the basic school crisis response plan, assessment of mental health risk following a crisis event, and the provision of crisis interventions within a multitiered system of support framework. Additionally, it summarizes ongoing effectiveness and implementation research used to evaluate and improve the model based on immediate training outcomes assessed through pre and postmeasures and training transfer to applied school contexts. Implications for research and public policy regarding school safety and crisis prevention and intervention, as well as the future of PREPaRE curriculum development, are discussed.