PUZ454 Leadership in Disaster Management

Unit Outline: Flexible Period - A 2022, Online (Start Date: 16 May 2022)

Overview

This unit addresses the key concepts and skills related to leadership and strategic issues related to inclusive, future-oriented disaster risk management and resilience building. It examines the underlying drivers of risk, including factors  such  as  social,  economic,  technological, climate-related health issues, increasing global  interdependencies and uneven economic development. The unit provides opportunities for environmental scanning, stakeholder mapping, crisis communication planning and decision-making in rapidly changing environments. Upon completion of this unit you will have a greater understanding of the critical role of the disaster and emergency risk assessment and how to prepare and deliver a media briefing using effective communication strategies and protocols.

Learning Outcomes

On successful completion of this unit you will be able to:

1. Apply strategies to lead and manage key strategic issues confronting disaster risk management
2. Prepare and deliver a media briefing using effective communication strategies and protocols
3. Critically analyse and evaluate strategic leadership theory and models to determine and justify your preferred leadership style and approach
4. Critically reflect upon and evaluate preparations and response and recovery arrangements for disasters
5. Analyse and plan for future challenges in disaster-risk mananagement and leadership

Content

Learning Approaches

This unit adopts a blended learning approach that combines online learning with intensive face-to-face interactive workshops. In this unit you will have the opportunity to learn through a wide variety of engaging online learning materials that will help you to explore the theoretical principles and frameworks that underpin this unit. Additionally, you will have the opportunity to actively engage with your peers, real-world industry practitioners and teaching staff to apply and consolidate your learning through creative problem-solving and teamwork activities, role plays, scenarios and critically analysing contemporary real-world case studies.

Feedback on Learning and Assessment

You will receive feedback on your learning in a variety of ways, including:

• Informal formative feedback will be provided via online quizzes, self-check exercises, peer feedback and through individual or whole of class feedback in online discussions or via comments in online communities.
  
  
• Formal written or recorded feedback will be received on both formative and summative assessment tasks via Turnitin or the Canvas Assignment tool, in addition to the grade on the Criterion Reference Assessment sheet.

Assessment

Overview

You are required to complete two assessment tasks: the preparation of a climate change health and vulnerability assessment for a specific population and an authentic leadership simulation. These two authentic tasks are designed to provide you with the opportunity to draw together your knowledge and skills developed in the other units and to reflect upon and develop your strategic leadership and media communication skills.

Unit Grading Scheme

7- point scale

Assessment Tasks

Assessment: Climate change health and vulnerability assessment

You are required to conduct research on a population of your choice and undertake a climate change health and vulnerability assessment using industry accepted tools.

This is an assignment for the purposes of an extension.

Assessment: Leadership Challenge

You will be assigned a specific agency role where you must collaborate with others representing different agencies to manage an complex, volatile, changing issue.  Individually, you will prepare and deliver to camera a media briefing on the emergency/disaster that is currently emerging. You will need to critique the recording of your media briefing drawing upon the literature and identify actions for improvement. 

After the completion of the scenario and media briefing, you will undertake a retrospective, where you will individually reflect upon both the performance of the team and your individual leadership capabilities leadership style demonstrated, media briefing presentation, lessons learned and what you would do differently in the future. Your reflection should be supported by and reference relevant scholarly literature.

Academic Integrity

Students are expected to engage in learning and assessment at QUT with honesty, transparency and fairness. Maintaining academic integrity means upholding these principles and demonstrating valuable professional capabilities based on ethical foundations.

Failure to maintain academic integrity can take many forms. It includes cheating in examinations, plagiarism, self-plagiarism, collusion, and submitting an assessment item completed by another person (e.g. contract cheating). It can also include providing your assessment to another entity, such as to a person or website.

You are encouraged to make use of QUT’s learning support services, resources and tools to assure the academic integrity of your assessment. This includes the use of text matching software that may be available to assist with self-assessing your academic integrity as part of the assessment submission process.

Further details of QUT’s approach to academic integrity are outlined in the Academic integrity policy and the Student Code of Conduct. Breaching QUT’s Academic integrity policy is regarded as student misconduct and can lead to the imposition of penalties ranging from a grade reduction to exclusion from QUT.

Requirements to Study

Requirements

Nil

Costs

There are no additional costs associated with this unit.

Resources

Resource Materials

Recommended text(s)

FitzGerald, G., Tarrant, M., Aitken, P. and Fredriksen, M. (2016). Disaster Health Management: A Primer for Students and Practitioners (1st ed.). London & NY: Routledge.

Risk Assessment Statement

You are advised to back-up your digital files on a regular basis to ensure work is not lost if there is a hardware failure. Information about the free file storage provided by QUT for students is available on the Storing your files page.

There are no out of the ordinary risks associated with this unit.

Course Learning Outcomes

HZ38 Graduate Certificate in Health Science

1. Apply discipline knowledge to the promotion of the health and welfare of individuals, communities and/or groups
   Relates to: Climate change health and vulnerability assessment, Leadership Challenge
2. Analyse emergent issues, synthesise complex information to distil a clear message from the evidence base to inform holistic decisions
   Relates to: Climate change health and vulnerability assessment, Leadership Challenge
3. Apply contextualised communication skills in a broad range of professional settings
   Relates to: Leadership Challenge
4. Apply adaptive and collaborative skills to initiate and implement a range of technical or management tasks with responsibility and accountability for self, organisation and others
   Relates to: Leadership Challenge