Disaster Recovery and Human Services

Running head: ESSAY
Human Service Delivery
Name of the Student
Name of the University
Author’s Note

1ESSAY
Introduction
The rural communities have always been the subject to change and face the natural
disaster for decades. The disasters might occur in both rural and urban communities.
However, the impact of the disaster on the rural communities is considerable greater than the
rural communities due to several reasons. The number of disasters faced by the rural
communities is also greater than the urban ones. Besides, the frequencies and intensity have
been exacerbated in the recent times due to global warming and the communities are now
facing more number with longer periods of bushfire, flood and draught. The prediction of
these disasters is more complicated than every due to the uncertainty of the climate change.
Modern developing technology is constantly failing in predicting the sudden change in the
climate. This make the recovery policy necessary to rapidly cope up and overcome the impact
of the disasters. The government and non-government team of social workers had always
been into action for the post disaster recovery. However, the competency of these practices
has always been in the subject of questioning. The constantly changing policies taken by the
government fails to address the issue from a complete perspective. It is because of the
limitations of the serviced implement in the post disaster recovery and somewhat for the rural
people. The rural men tends to hold back to their assets in order to protect them, mean while,
the female tends to flee from the area with the children. This gap tends to have more impact
on the community in the decision-making and the people seems to get trap in the middle of
the escape due to their late decision-making. The human services provided to these affected
population seems to have a number of strengths and weaknesses. Those have been identified
in this discussion along with the challenges faced by the social worker in the real world
situation.
Background of the Issues

2ESSAY
Australia has been facing major bushfire incidents for more than a decade now. A
number of major bushfires have devastating effect the Australian population over years. The
hot and dry climatic condition of the continent had been causing these natural disasters and
causing massive damage to the population every year. The prone areas attacked by this
particular disaster are Queensland, Victoria, New South Wales and the adjacent areas and
every year it burns thousands of hectors of forest and residential lands. The major incident of
2009 in Victoria that got international attention is named ‘Black Saturday’ as it took lives of
nearly 173 Victorians (Alston, 2009). Another major incident of NSW and Queensland took
place in 2013 springtime that burnt thousand of hectors of forest grounds (Rfs.nsw.gov.au,
2017). It was a result of several dispersed fire in the forest of NSW and Queensland. It has
been a major issue faced by the Australian government for a number of decades and the
government has declared the areas as fire prone area that holds different policy than the rest
of the country regarding bushfire matters. The government has initiated several ways to
control these uncontrollable firs through water bombing from aircrafts and ground fire
departments. However, the loss of the population is always greater before the fire is
controlled. Support is required for the directly affected population due to their loss of
properties, assets, neighbourhood, friends and families. These disasters has both the physical
and mental impact on the individuals who evidenced this naked cruelty of the nature. Hence,
they require support in the process of recovery. The government and the private organizations
of the social works are actively providing them the human support in several ways. Red Cross
and its followers are the front line in this campaign of human support. However, the support
models both physical and virtual have some strength and weakness in providing the human
support services to the affected populations. They have to face several challenges in the
process on various grounds. Both the models implemented have a number of limitations and
the situation like this requires particular set of models from both the types of service models

3ESSAY
in properly addressing the issue in hand. Some of the suited models proposed for the
implementation (the Guardian., 2017).
Services Suited
Several human services is useful in the process of post disaster recovery. Both face-
to-face service virtual service models can propose potential services to the communities
affected. They can be like the following from each.
Face-to-face Services – Counselling, community development, injury recovery, relocation,
food supply.
Virtual Services – Counselling, meeting, education for disaster recovery and future
preparation, compensations.
Human Service
Pidgeon, Ford and Klaassen (2014) identified Human Service as a broad field with a
single objective of meeting the human needs with interdisciplinary knowledge base. The
focus of the human service is to prevent and remediate the problems of the communities and
maintain commitment to improve the overall living standard of the community people.
Human service professionals also deal with the disaster management and provide services for
recovery of the affected communities. Broadly, the service are of two types that are face-to-
face service models and virtual service models of human service. Both the types has several
expertise and the necessary ones are implemented in according to the situation. These models
have some strengths and weaknesses that are discussed below.
Face-to-face service delivery
Face-to-face service is the physical service carried out by the service team and
provided to the needed community. Monette, Sullivan and DeJong (2013) expressed that the