Including Local Initiatives, Behaviours and Altruism in Disaster Responses : Patient Logistics through Protection Motivation Theory

Would I help you if I needed to save myself? Hard times are known to bring out the true nature of people, but in disaster scenarios, are people driven to only protect themselves or also to help others?

Disasters have health consequences. Recent events highlighted the need to provide urgent care to victims. In disaster scenarios, the help of informal actors is crucial (Fredriksen, 2021), as they are often the first on-site and give the help needed while waiting for a formal response, often delayed (Gingerich, 2015). Typically, a disaster will lead to a surge of patients who require immediate care despite inaccessible and disrupted formal healthcare infrastructures (Labrague, 2023). The challenge of patient logistics with informal actors is, therefore, rapidly transporting those in need of care to locations where they can be treated (Villa, 2014).

But, these responses come with a risk. While the priority is given to helping others, some prefer to protect themselves, which is a common aspect of the Protection Motivation Theory (PMT), looking at the influence of threat and coping appraisal on disaster responses to inform if you would be protecting yourself or not (Rogers, 1975). While focusing on self-protection, PMT overlooks the incentive to protect or not others, which could be driven by personal values and emotional factors known to be influenced by environmental changes like disasters (Balla, 2014). This altruism and the dynamic nature of disasters would be an addition to the PMT.

In our study, we inform PMT approaches by adding altruism and motivation to help others in times of disaster across various time phases of the disaster response. We include the first informal response conducted by communities, followed by the formal response, including healthcare professionals and emergency responders. We show the main factors influencing altruistic behaviours through survey data, looking back at the response to the 2021 European Floods.

This study explores the presence of altruism in individuals in the context of patient logistics. Through this, we aim to advance the knowledge of PMT by incorporating altruism and emotional motivations, offering new insights into community disaster response behaviours. The findings suggest that disaster response strategies should focus on self-protection and promote community-driven efforts and trust in formal and informal systems. We are therefore proposing a consolidated PMT approach as a starting point for discussion and leading further empirical work on the role of altruism in patient logistics in disasters.