Moving Beyond “Special Needs”

Disaster preparation and emergency response processes, procedures, and systems can be made more effective for people with disabilities, as well as for the population as a whole. An essential element of building appropriate levels of capacity, specific planning, and response success is to move beyond use of the “special needs” category, to better identify and address the diverse needs of those included under this label. This article provides disability demographics and describes special needs populations to lay the foundation for this change. It suggests the development of a more accurate and flexible planning and response framework based on essential, sometimes overlapping, functional needs: communication, medical needs, maintaining functional independence, supervision, and transportation (C-MIST). It also proposes new approaches to functional support, leadership, service delivery, and training.