Collaboration of The Emergency Managers and Scientists

Collaboration with Scientists is Important

In my opinion, the emergency managers should work in collaboration with the social and physical scientists during all the phases of emergency management. It is not only sufficient to collaborate with the scientists during the response phase but there should be a clear collaboration between the scientists and emergency managers during the phases of preparedness, mitigation and recovery. This is important because managers are well-versed with the tasks of communication and organizations but they do not know the physical or social sciences to the extent the scientists do.

When the scientists and emergency managers work together, they can deal with the emergency in an organized fashion. For example, the social scientist would have a complete understanding about the perceptions and preferences of the people of any location. Based on that insight, he would easily offer suggestion to the emergency manager about how to convince people on taking certain actions. In the present day scenario where outbreak of Corona has been regarded as a medical emergency, the healthcare organizations and managers have been working in collaboration with the physical as well as social scientists. At one hand, the physical scientists are offering help in the process of inventing vaccines or manufacturing more masks and on the other hand, the social scientists have been engaged in developing more convincing messages for their people so they take precautionary measures and the epidemic can be controlled. It is clear from this example that in case all the scientists and emergency managers do not work together, it would never be possible to innovate and flourish in the society.

Since the emergency managers are responsible for planning and recovering from the disasters, the scientists helps them by providing solutions which could reduce the effort. Hence, collaborating with scientists in all phases of emergency management offers an edge to the managers.