This book is primarily about securing your home against potential unwanted intruders and keeping your family safe.

"The rise in violent crime affecting my country stems directly from an increase in criminal behavior and farm attacks, resulting in loss of innocent lives in my country. The message in this book goes out to all innocent, law-abiding citizens of South Africa. It is time to take a stand and prepare yourselves against becoming victims of the lawlessness plaguing our country. The authorities themselves face great challenges, numerous obstacles, and insufficient support. As a result, we are losing the battle against all crime and, particularly, violent crime. It is now up to individual citizens to change their mind-set and become unbeatable adversaries of the criminal element.

I don’t advocate vigilantism or breaking the law in order to achieve this. What I suggest instead is that people need to develop the mental and physical skills to avoid violence in the first place and then, if necessary, use a level of violence higher than that which would be imposed on them in a conflict situation." - Craig B. Roseveare

The 80 rules you need to prepare for action in a medical disaster

Here are 80 disaster management rules to reflect on, remember and follow in the immediate aftermath of an incident involving mass casualties. Each rule is a single-page long, providing the essential information to inform the most common critical decisions you will have to make in either a civilian or military environment.

Written by clinicians with deep clinical and operational experience, these rules are concise evidence-based guidelines for all medical personnel dealing with disasters at the scene or in hospital. Based on the Major Incident Medical Management and Support system widely adopted in the UK, mainland Europe, Australasia and NATO, they are both authoritative and effective.

Cultural Diversity as a Strategic Advantage

This insightful and practical work should be required reading for managers, physicians, nurses, allied health caregivers, and support staff, in order to overcome barriers to communication and change in dealing with an increasingly complex patient and employee base. I highly Andorse this excellent book written by these outstanding authors.

--Donald R. Oxley, vice president and executive director, Kaiser Permanente

As reflected in new cultural competency requirements for health care organizations, sensitivity to and understanding of cultural diversity have become mandatory for health care professionals. However, most health care professionals have little or no training on how to deal with the challenges of cultural diversity. With Managing Diversity in Health Care, you'll learn effective strategies fundamental to creating a culturally diverse health care organization.

This essential handbook provides you with the necessary knowledge and tools to become more responsive to culturally diverse patient and staff populations. The authors show how to build diverse teams, deal with the thorny issues of prejudice and bias, and communicate effectively within a diverse health care setting.

Evacuating a city is a complex problem that involves issues of governance, preparedness education, warning, information sharing, population dynamics, resilience and recovery. As natural and anthropogenic threats to cities grow, it is an increasingly pressing problem for policy makers and practitioners. The book is the result of a unique interdisciplinary collaboration between researchers in the physical and social sciences to consider how an interdisciplinary approach can help plan for large scale evacuations. It draws on perspectives from physics, mathematics, organisation theory, economics, sociology and education. Importantly it goes beyond disciplinary boundaries and considers how interdisciplinary methods are necessary to approach a complex problem involving human actors and increasingly complex communications and transportation infrastructures. Using real world case studies and modelling the book considers new approaches to evacuation dynamics. It addresses questions of complexity, not only in terms of theory, but examining the latest challenges for cities and emergency responders. Factors such as social media, information quality and visualisation techniques are examined to consider the 'new' dynamics of warning and informing, evacuation and recovery.

This volume presents a unique interdisciplinary approach, drawing on expertise in both the natural and social sciences. A primary goal is to present a scientific and socially integrated perspective on place-based community engagement, extreme weather, and health. Each year extreme weather is leading to natural disasters around the world and exerting huge social and health costs. The International Monetary Fund (2012) estimates that since 2010, 700 worldwide natural disasters have affected more than 450 million people around the globe. The best coping strategy for extreme weather and environmental change is a strong offense. Communities armed with a spatial understanding of their resources, risks, strengths, weaknesses, community capabilities, and social networks will have the best chance of reducing losses and achieving a better outcome when extreme weather and disaster strikes.

Around the world, extreme weather events are becoming increasingly "the new normal" and are expected to increase in the 21st century as a result of climate change. Extreme weather events have devastating impacts on human lives and national economies. This book examines ways to protect people from hazards using early warning systems, and includes contributions from experts from four different continents representing 14 different universities, 8 government agencies and two UN agencies. Chapters detail critical components of early warning systems, ways to identify vulnerable communities, predict hazards and deliver information. Unique satellite images illustrate the transnational impact of disasters, while case studies provide detailed examples of warning systems. With contributors from the fields of economics, ethics, meteorology, geography and biology, this book is essential reading for anyone interested in disaster risk reduction or climate change.

"Intelligent Transportation and Evacuation Planning: A Modeling-Based Approach" provides a new paradigm for evacuation planning strategies and techniques. Recently, evacuation planning and modeling have increasingly attracted interest among researchers as well as government officials. This interest stems from the recent catastrophic hurricanes and weather-related events that occurred in the southeastern United States (Hurricane Katrina and Rita). The evacuation methods that were in place before and during the hurricanes did not work well and resulted in thousands of deaths. This book offers insights into the methods and techniques that allow for implementing mathematical-based, simulation-based, and integrated optimization and simulation-based engineering approaches for evacuation planning.

As current information technology and social media continue to make it easier for us to keep in touch with one another, organizations are asking whether social media is reliable enough for its crisis response plans. Using Social and Information Technologies for Disaster and Crisis Management highlights examples of disaster situations in recent years in which social and information technologies were useful in distributing and receiving information updates. This comprehensive collection brings together research for practitioners and researchers interested in the uses of information technology in crisis management.

This book examines the relationship between development economics, social protection and democratization in the specific context of Sub-Saharan Africa. Moving existing theories of transformation into a new terrain, it sheds light on the exclusive origins of dictatorship and democracy. The book explains how development, social protection and democracy-enhancing policies have been produced by existing institutional frameworks and contingent responses to emergency events, and that these have themselves been shaped by the actions of actors and by their embeddedness in the surrounding political, economic, cultural and social environment. The book also draws attention to the most relevant institutional and social mechanisms, with associated elite strategies and power politics relations in the creation of politically-induced conflicts. In doing so, it highlights the important role of welfare institutions in the reduction and reproduction of vertical and horizontal inequalities as well as their repercussion in the emergence of social conflicts.

The federal government plays a significant role in emergency management, which generally refers to activities associated with avoiding and responding to natural and human-caused hazards. Emergency management in the United States is highly decentralised and contextual in nature: activities often involve multiple jurisdictions as well as a vast number of agencies, non-governmental organisations, and private sector entities. In addition, the number and type of actors involved in an incident will vary tremendously depending on the context and severity of the event. Similarly, the legal framework through which emergency management functions and activities are authorised is also decentralised and stems from multiple authorities. This book describes the process for requesting federal assistance for major disasters, emergencies, and fire suppression, with a focus on Presidential Policy Directive 8 and the National Preparedness System; the Federal Stafford Act Disaster Assistance; and federal disaster recovery programs.