23 October 2020
The British Psychological Society has published new guidance designed to empower communities in their response to the Covid-19 pandemic.
23 October 2020
The British Psychological Society has published new guidance designed to empower communities in their response to the Covid-19 pandemic.
The guidance is designed to help with slowing the spread of the virus, mitigating against the negative psychological effects of lockdown measures, and ultimately enabling recovery.
It has been produced by the BPS’s Covid-19 Community Action and Resilience Working Group and is designed to assist local authorities, local resilience forums, heads of services and community groups by drawing on psychological insights that help build the collective response.
Professor John Drury (University of Sussex), who was a lead author on the guidance, said:
“This new guidance brings together key principles from the evidence from community responses to different emergencies and threats, showing what works based on communities’ psychosocial strengths and capacities.
Research shows that it is members of the public, not the professionals, who provide most of the support when disaster strikes.
We hope the guidance will be useful for communities themselves as well as those who work with them.”
The guidance incorporates the concept of community resilience, which refers to the ability of communities to participate in the reaction to and recovery from times of crisis.
The guidance makes six recommendations to facilitate community resilience: