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Disasters of catastrophic scope and scale have occurred more frequently in recent years. Governmental and non-governmental response management has struggled, and affected communities have severely suffered during extreme events. Colossal damage and loss of lives have been inflicted, and the recovery efforts require extended periods of time. In post hoc analyses, actionable information has been found a critical resource requiring resilient information infrastructures (RIIs) that do not break down even under extreme duress. RIIs encompass both tangible and less tangible (for example, social) elements. The purpose of this paper is to pave the way for empirical research on the subject and to conceptually develop a framework for the analysis of information infrastructures and their resiliency, when impacted by catastrophic incidents (also known as extreme events).

The authors review the literatures of disaster research and related fields. They synthesize the literatures from the information perspective and develop a framework of RII.

The synthesis revealed that extreme event-ready RIIs have to be redundant and resourceful both in terms of social, organizational, and knowledge assets as well as in the information and communication technologies. RIIs combine tangible and non-tangible elements, whose interplay is so far incompletely understood.

Roles and criticality of RIIs under the impact of an extreme event need to be studied empirically.

The study holds the promise to be of great potential utility for responders and recovery managers as well as affected communities in preparedness, response, recovery, and mitigation efforts as timely and actionable information is still the scarcest and most sought resource during a catastrophic incident.

Disaster research so far has mostly focused on the technical, organizational, social, and socio-psychological effects of disasters. The authors are adding the information perspective as a unique and distinctive contribution to extreme event research, which connects the tangible elements of information infrastructures with its not so tangible elements, captures their interplay, and analyzes their role and criticality for the resiliency of the information infrastructures when under extreme duress.

The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the common themes leading or contributing to clinical incidents in a UK teaching hospital.

A root‐cause analysis was conducted on patient safety incidents. Commonly occurring root causes and contributing factors were collected and correlated with incident timing and severity.

In total, 65 root‐cause analyses were reviewed, highlighting 202 factors implicated in the clinical incidents and 69 categories were identified. The 14 most commonly occurring causes (encountered in four incidents or more) were examined as a key‐root or contributory cause. Incident timing was also analysed; common factors were encountered more frequently during out‐hours – occurring as contributory rather than a key‐root cause.

In total, 14 commonly occurring factors were identified to direct interventions that could prevent many clinical incidents. From these, an “Organisational Safety Checklist” was developed to involve departmental level clinicians to monitor practice.

This study demonstrates that comprehensively investigating incidents highlights common factors that can be addressed at a local level. Resilience against clinical incidents is low during out‐of‐hours periods, where factors such as lower staffing levels and poor service provision allows problems to escalate and become clinical incidents, which adds to the literature regarding out‐of‐hours care provision and should prove useful to those organising hospital services at departmental and management levels.

Tourism development is critical for economic transformation, particularly in emerging economies. However, the growing spate of terrorism dissuades international tourists, reduces tourism receipts and ultimately hampers the tourism sector's performance. Thus, the government intervenes by altering its military spending to curtail terrorism. Against this backdrop, this study examines the moderating role of military spending in the terrorism–tourism nexus in Nigeria.

The study employs the dynamic ordinary least squares (DOLS) to investigate the moderating role of military spending in the terrorism–tourism nexus in Nigeria. The authors employ the data that cover the period 1995Q1–2019Q4.

The results reveal that terrorism has a catastrophic effect on tourism arrivals in Nigeria while military spending has a positive impact on tourism arrivals. The results further show the moderating role of military spending in the terrorism–tourism nexus is positive and statistically significant. However, the findings are subject to the measures of military spending, terrorism and tourism.

The practical implication of the findings is the need for deliberate and strategic budgeting for the Ministry of Defence to combat terrorism, which should not only focus on the procurement of arms and ammunition but also cover the welfare of the military personnel. Nigeria also needs to formulate and implement necessary tourism policies aimed at countering terrorism in a bid to create and maintain a positive image on the global tourist map.

Many studies, particularly in developing countries like Nigeria, had examined the effect of terrorism on tourism but none has examined the moderating role of military spending in the terrorism–tourism nexus. Hence, this study examines the moderating role of military spending in the relationship between terrorism and tourism in Nigeria, a terrorism-prone country with several tourist sites.

Many organisations, including the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists, have recommended increasing the number of hours of consultant obstetric presence in UK National Health Service maternity units to improve patient care. St Mary’s Hospital, Manchester implemented 24-7 consultant presence in September 2014. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

To assess the impact of 24-7 consultant presence upon women and babies, a retrospective review of all serious clinical intrapartum incidents occurring between September 2011 and September 2017 was carried out by two independent reviewers; disagreements in classification were reviewed by a senior Obstetrician. The impact of consultant presence was classified in a structure agreed a priori.

A total of 72 incidents were reviewed. Consultants were directly involved in the care of 75.6 per cent of cases before 24-7 consultant presence compared to 96.8 per cent afterwards. Negative impact due to a lack of consultant presence fell from 22 per cent of the incidents before 24-7 consultant presence to 9.7 per cent after implementation. In contrast, positive impact of consultant presence increased from 14.6 to 32.3 per cent following the introduction of 24-7 consultant presence.

Introduction of 24-7 consultant presence reduced the negative impact caused by a lack of, or delay in, consultant presence as identified by serious untoward incident (SUI) reviews. Consultant presence was more likely to have a positive influence on care delivery.

This is the first assessment of the impact of 24-7 consultant presence on the SUIs in obstetrics.

The purpose of this paper is to identify the issues and challenges in humanitarian logistics and to develop a framework for effectively managing the humanitarian logistics in disaster relief supply chain operations in India.

This paper presents a framework to manage humanitarian logistics effectively in disaster management through qualitative analysis. First, the author examines the challenges facing the humanitarian logistics and supply chain through the reviews of the literature on various disasters. Then, the author presented a framework based on the best practices and initiatives taken worldwide in the preparedness and response stage of the humanitarian supply chain to manage and reduce the aftermath of any disaster in context to India.

A framework has been developed to manage humanitarian logistics in the disaster relief operation, which would improve the humanitarian supply chain in India and help to effectively manage natural disasters in the preparedness and response stage at the state and district levels.

The paper mainly emphasises on the preparedness and response stage of disaster supply chain management in Indian context.

None of the disaster incidents can be stopped from taking place, but the impact can be minimised by proper preparedness and effective response during the operations of humanitarian logistics. With this hope, the framework has been developed, which if implemented would help to plan and manage any disaster incident in an effective manner, which ultimately would save millions of lives and cost in terms of infrastructure, property, assets etc.

As natural disaster incidents are occurring frequently in Indian states, there is an urgent need for a framework to manage the logistics operations effectively and efficiently during any disaster relief operations. Limited literature is found on developing and presenting a framework focusing on the preparedness and response phase of disaster supply chain management in context to India. Hence, this paper is believed to be the first to fulfil this gap with main emphasis on the preparedness and response stage of disaster supply chain management in Indian scenario.

This study aims to provide data on the optimal staff, materials, space and time resources required to operate a regional hub reception center, a “short-term facility with the goal to process and transport displaced survivors (evacuees) to temporary or permanent shelters following a catastrophic incident” (Bonabeau, 2002). The facility will process approximately 20,000 evacuees over its entire seven-day duration following a disaster to assist in community resilience.

The study was performed using a model created using the computer simulation software, AnyLogic. The software allowed for simulations to be performed on each of the three criteria: minimizing the space needed to run the hub, minimizing individual throughput time and minimizing total operation time.

The results of the study demonstrated that the goals set forth by the Illinois-Indiana-Wisconsin Regional Catastrophic Planning Team could be improved upon and that the largest contributing factor to optimizing the regional hub reception center (RHRC) is finding the optimal number of total staff members to operate the facility.

The value of the study lies in creating a life-saving environment for evacuees who could otherwise not evacuate themselves. The assistance provided by the RHRC gives displaced survivors a safe and organized method for evacuating a large city after a disaster. The study shows how computer models can help improve resilience in an urban area by planning the most efficient methods for evacuating it should it be necessary.

The purpose of this paper is to provide a review of mega fire catastrophic phenomena and bring out some useful aspects for more effective pre‐, during and post‐disaster management of mega fires.

The paper uses two very recent (2007) mega fire cases (Peloponnese – Greece and California – USA) to provide evidence of the magnitude of this kind of disaster and how their impacts can be mitigated if certain management practices are implemented.

Mega fires are major catastrophic events, with multiple impacts for the communities and areas in which they happen. They are very difficult to manage, mainly owing to their magnitude. However, their negative effects and impacts can be mitigated if pre‐, during, and post‐disaster activities and measures are planned and implemented.

This paper could be useful to practitioners and public service managers that are responsible for the development of fire management policies and management of mega fires situations.

This paper aims to explore how big data analytics (BDA) emerging technologies crossed with social media (SM). Twitter can be used to improve decision-making before and during maritime accidents. We propose a conceptual early warning system called community alert and communications system (ComACom) to prevent future accidents.

Based on secondary data, the authors developed a narrative case study of the MV Wakashio maritime disaster. The authors adopted a post-constructionist approach through the use of media richness and synchronicity theory, highlighting wider community voices drawn from social media (SM), particularly Twitter. The authors applied BDA techniques to a dataset of real-time tweets to evaluate the unfolding operational response to the maritime emergency.

The authors reconstituted a narrative of four escalating sub-events and illustrated how critical decisions taken in an organisational and institutional vacuum led to catastrophic consequences. We highlighted the specific roles of three main stakeholders (the ship's organisation, official institutions and the wider community). Our study shows that SM enhanced with BDA, embedded within our ComACom model, can better achieve collective sense-making of emergency accidents.

This study is limited to Twitter data and one case. Our conceptual model needs to be operationalised.

ComACom will improve decision-making to minimise human errors in maritime accidents.

Emergency response will be improved by including the voices of the wider community.

ComACom conceptualises an early warning system using emerging BDA/AI technologies to improve safety in maritime transportation.

This paper aims to examine the role of social auditing in legitimising the relationship between the buyer and supplier firms rather than strengthening corporate accountability in the global supply chain.

Applying case study methodology and drawing on Suchman’s theory on societal legitimacy, it is argued that social audits are artefacts of legitimacy, and global firms dominate the buyer–supplier relationship across the supply chain. The analysis is based on data collected from different secondary sources, including Walmart’s corporate sustainability reports.

Using Walmart’s relationship with Tazreen Fashions Limited around the Tazreen factory fire incident as a case study, it explains that the practices which attempt to symbolically demonstrate accountability from social audits need to shift to a more continuous and sincere demonstration of accountability through the social audit process. For this to occur, the cognitive and pragmatic approaches that international buyers have previously used in auditing their supply firms’ social responsibility are no longer sufficient to achieve societal legitimacy. Instead, a moral turn needs to underpin the intentions and actions of these buyers to maintain legitimacy and demonstrate accountability across the supply industry in developing economies.

The findings of the study answer the questions raised in the extant literature about the expectation from social auditing and whether social auditing serves to ensure corporate accountability. The paper contributes to the policymaking discussion of how social auditing can be configured to include a legal provision to ensure that social auditing is not a parroting tool for corporations.

As noted in the Department of Homeland Security's National Response Framework, disasters are inherently local and ultimately the responsibility of the lowest jurisdictional level present within the impacted area. Given these parameters, this paper aims to sharpen the concept of national resilience by recommending a framework which positions community resilience as an integral variable in understanding the ability of impacted areas to effectively manage the consequences of disasters. Conceptualized as a dependent variable, community resilience is influenced by the relationships government (public) agencies develop with private sector partners and the resilience of relevant supply chains and critical infrastructures/key resources which exist in their communities.

The authors augment a topical literature review of academic and practitioner journals by synthesizing existing findings into a holistic framework of community resilience.

This paper argues that interdependent systems like social and economic networks will ultimately influence the ability of communities to adapt and respond to the consequences of disasters. In addressing the resilience of these systems, all levels of government must recognize and embrace the public‐private interfaces that can improve their ability to manage the response and recovery phases of disaster management. While 85 percent of critical infrastructure is owned by the private sector, 100 percent of it exists within communities and impacts the ability of the nation to recover from disasters. Resilience calls upon active management and relies upon assessment and a willingness to take action in the face of adversity.

Resilience is discussed within economics, behavioral sciences, supply chain management and critical infrastructure protection. This paper integrates these research streams to develop a framework for shaping national resilience.