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Prevention is better than cure – Matt Hancock’s speech to IANPHI We’re here to talk prevention. And if there’s one thing that everybody knows it’s: ‘prevention is better than cure’. When I was thinking about prevention I looked into where this comes from. I’m told it was Erasmus, the 16th century Dutch philosopher, who coined the insight.

• The irony was that Erasmus died suddenly from an attack of dysentery, which we now know is a wholly preventable condition.
• The other person who can lay claim was Benjamin Franklin, who said: ‘an ounce of prevention is better than a pound of cure’.
• And Franklin founded the first fire brigade in Philadelphia and made it one of the safest cities for fires in the world.

So prevention works. As the founding fathers knew.

1. Prevention saves lives and saves money.
2. Two of the biggest health successes of the 20th century had prevention at their core: vaccination and cutting smoking.
3. In the UK, both were achieved by careful and considered government intervention.
4. We didn’t outlaw cigarettes because blanket bans curtail personal freedoms and often have the opposite effect.
5. We encouraged better behaviour through informing the public and by stopping smoking in public places where it could affect the health of others.

We didn’t compel people to vaccinate against their will. We helped them see it was in their interests and everybody else’s too. Ultimately, at the heart of our public provision for healthcare there’s a social contract. A social contract at the heart of our NHS.

• We, the citizens, have a right to the healthcare we need, when we need it, free at the point of use.
• But, we have a responsibility to pay our taxes to fund it, and to use the health service carefully, with consideration for others, and to comply with medical advice to look after ourselves.
• Because the NHS is not just a service – it’s a shared stake in society.

Too much of the health debate in England has been about our rights: what we deserve, and what the NHS can deliver. And, of course, those rights are important. But, I think we need to pay more attention to our responsibilities, as well as our rights. Today, I want to talk about those responsibilities, and our task for the National Health Service to help empower people to take more care of their own health.

• I want to talk about how we need to focus more on prevention to transform our health and social care system, save money, eliminate waste and make the extra £20.5 billion we’re putting in go as far as it can.
• Because only with better prevention can our NHS be sustainable in the long term.
• Over just the last year, emergency admissions at A&E have increased by 6.6%.

This rate of growth of demand is simply unsustainable. But, of course, it’s not just about the finances. I want to talk about how preventing ill health can transform lives, and transform society for the better too. That might sound radical. It is intended to.

1. The government-wide plan we are publishing today sets out how we need a radical shift in how the NHS sees itself, from a hospital service for the ill, to a nationwide service to keep us healthy.
2. Where those who work on the front line of the NHS including the GPs, who are its bedrock, feel confident to remind people of their responsibilities too.
3. So first, let’s talk about those responsibilities.

At the core of my political philosophy is a belief that the state has a duty to protect the most vulnerable in society, and an equally firm belief that we must empower people to fulfil their potential to be the best they possibly can be. From the education they receive in school, to the freedom they have to achieve in work.

• And nowhere is this more true than with health.
• Given this duty, our starting point is to ask: what contributes to living longer in good health?
• The Prime Minister has set this question as part of the Ageing Grand Challenge – to seek 5 years’ longer healthy life expectancy by 2035.
• The best evidence points to a 4-factor breakdown.

Around a quarter of what leads to longer healthier life is acute care – or what goes on in hospitals. The second factor is genetics. The third factor is environmental – things like air quality that an individual can’t control.

1. And the final factor is what people do – the choices they make, the lifestyle they choose.
2. Different people put different proportions on these 4 factors: but suffice to say they’re all important.
3. Yet currently, we spend the overwhelming majority of the £115 billion NHS budget on acute care.
4. Last year, we spent just £11 billion on primary care where the bulk of prevention happens.
5. Yet the combination of prevention and predictive medicine have more than twice the impact on length of healthy life.
6. That isn’t just the difference between life and death, it’s the difference between spending the last 20 years of your life fit and active, or in a chronic condition.

So our focus must shift from treating single acute illnesses to promoting the health of the whole individual. And from prevention across the population as a whole to targeted, predictive prevention. So as the government is spending £20.5 billion more of taxpayers’ hard-earned cash over the next 5 years – the single, largest cash injection to the NHS ever – we must see the proportion of funding on primary and community care in the NHS rise.

And that is exactly what will happen in the long-term plan. But it isn’t just about the quantum of money. It’s also about reform. I want to see people taking greater personal responsibility for managing their own health. For looking after themselves better, so staying active and stopping smoking. Now, I want to address head on how we can do this without undermining people’s liberty.

Take alcohol. Like many people, I enjoy the odd glass of wine. I support the budget in which we froze duty on scotch and beer. I don’t believe in punishing the masses to target those who need help. Yet alcohol abuse puts a huge burden on the NHS. High-risk drinkers make up less than 5% of the population, but consume over a third of all alcohol.

They’re more likely to end up in A&E. And drunk people are more likely to be responsible for abuse and violent attacks on NHS staff. I’ve seen it for myself. So we need action on alcohol that targets those who most need our support, without punishing those who don’t. Likewise, we know that smoking contributes to 4% of all hospital admissions in England each year.

And smoking costs the NHS around £2.5 billion each year. And this is despite the massive reduction in smoking over the past 30 years. For smoking, the next step towards a zero-smoking society is highly targeted anti-smoking interventions, especially in hospitals.

If someone is admitted as a heart patient, and we know that stopping smoking could save their life, then we will do everything we can to help them quit, as they do in Ottawa. This is a Canadian model I like the look of. I want to see bedside interventions in our hospitals so smokers who are patients are offered medication, behavioural support and follow-up checks when they go home.

And we need to fulfil our commitments to the obesity strategy, and set ambitious targets also on salt. Salt intake has fallen by 11% in under a decade, but if salt intake fell by a third it would prevent 8,000 premature deaths and save the NHS over £500 million annually.

So we are working on new solutions to tackle salt and will set out more details by Easter. Because focusing on the responsibilities of patients shouldn’t be about penalising people but about helping people to make better choices. How do we do that? How can we empower people to take more care of their own health? By giving people the knowledge, skills and confidence to take responsibility for their own health.

By using new digital technologies, to help people make informed decisions, with more access to primary and community care, and with more social prescribing, all aimed at stopping people from becoming patients in the first place. So the second thing I want to talk about is how we must focus more on prevention to transform our health and social care system to save money, eliminate waste and get the best return on our extra £20.5 billion.

This isn’t just about empowering people to take more personal responsibility. It’s about reforming the system and harnessing new opportunities. There are 2 new technologies in particular with the potential to change everything: the combination of artificial intelligence and genomics. They promise the potential to unlock our genetic codes; and allow us to apply those codes to how we live our lives.

To predict which of us are susceptible to which illnesses, to diagnose those already ill, faster, and to develop new tailor-made treatments to bring people back to health. Together, they will transform medicine. We are finally now able to crack that genetic factor of our health.

We can intervene earlier. Save money on unnecessary and invasive tests. Eliminate waste by prescribing the right medication or the right treatment the first time round. And save NHS resources for people who really need it. And this isn’t something that’s far off in the future. It’s already happening. The new NHS Genomic Medicine Service is expanding.

In Cambridge, we’re at the cusp of sequencing the 100,000th genome, and are now aiming to sequence 5 million so we can diagnose rare diseases, more quickly and with fewer painful tests for patients. The world-leading Moorfields Eye Hospital is working with the world-leading AI company Deepmind.

Their AI system has made the correct diagnosis on over 50 different eye diseases with 94% accuracy – at least matching the best human experts. And that figure is only going to improve. These technologies, and other new digital services giving targeted health advice, are starting to transform global medicine.

As it has been with every wave of technology for the last 70 years, the NHS must be at the forefront, embracing these new technologies and shaping them as they evolve and improve. The NHS must go from being the world’s biggest buyer of fax machines to the tech pioneers of the future.

• From 1796 when Edward Jenner developed the first smallpox vaccine, to 1928 when Alexander Fleming discovered penicillin, to 1950 when Richard Doll proved the link between smoking and cancer.
• The next frontier of prevention is using the data at our disposal to predict who will be ill with what, and to get in there early.
• The Prime Minister has spoken with great eloquence about the power of artificial intelligence to save lives by spotting cancer earlier – and we must do that.
• But predictive prevention has a far broader application.

From diagnosing a susceptibility to dementia due to a vitamin deficiency, to motivating activity to tackle obesity, we can have better, more targeted interventions than ever before. Again, giving better results, and helping the NHS eliminate waste and save money.

Our aim is to prevent people becoming patients through personalised advice and intervention. Public Health England are leading the way on predictive prevention. They are bringing together a range of experts so we can scale up this pioneering work to a national level. Now, I’ve talked about acute care, genetics, and choices.

So let’s turn to the final factor in determining a healthy lifespan: the environment. And this is linked to my third and final point: how getting prevention right will transform society for the better. Right now, we tend to think of things in isolation.

Pollution is seen as an environmental problem. Employment is something for the Treasury to worry about. And housing is either a public good or a private investment. But health can’t work in isolation. Our health is affected by each and every one of those. So a true focus on prevention means tackling the environmental factors that affect a person’s health too.

It means a new drive for clean air, building on the successes of recent years in cutting emissions. Secure employment, building on the record number of jobs available now. Higher quality housing. And it also means our GP surgeries, our hospitals, our care homes, our entire health and care system working more closely with local authorities, schools, businesses, charities and all the other parts that make up our communities.

• It means employers playing a bigger role in helping their staff stay healthy and to return to health after illness.
• And we can learn from the excellent work of our military here.
• Soldiers have an 85% return-to-work rate after a serious injury, and they obviously have some very serious injuries.
• The equivalent rate for civilians is only 35%.

The reason why the military is better at getting people back to work is because they are more engaged in their workers’ recovery at every stage of the process. Civilian employers must do the same. Employers have a responsibility to help improve the health of their staff and the nation.

1. To achieve this we need to strengthen the links between employers, their unwell staff, and the NHS.
2. That way, the challenge – for I never think of people as problems – doesn’t present itself at 3am at A&E.
3. Good health starts with the right pre-natal care, immunisation, nutritional support, fitness advice, minimising social media and mental health harms, secure employment, financial independence, safe housing, help with bad habits, friends and family to fight loneliness, careful and considered interventions at every stage of life into old age.
4. From cradle to grave, not just for the NHS, but for the whole of society.

Giving people responsibility for their own health. Empowering them to make the right decisions. The best help when they need help. That is what getting prevention right means. That is the potential of prevention. That is the promise that it offers: a healthier, happier future for us all. : Prevention is better than cure – Matt Hancock’s speech to IANPHI

What is the saying prevention better than cure?

This page is about the saying “Prevention is better than cure” Possible meaning: It’s better to take care that a problem does not happen than to have to solve the problem afterwards. It’s easier to stop something bad from happening in the first place than to fix the damage after it has happened.

What is a famous quote about prevention?

Sometimes we need to be cautious and take precautions. A great expression for that kind of behavior is, ‘ An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.’ This saying comes to us from Benjamin Franklin.

Who first said prevention is better than cure?

Promotion of healthy lifestyles and the prevention of ill health is a fundamental principle behind public health and improving the public’s health. The phrase ‘prevention is better than cure’ is often attributed to the Dutch philosopher Desiderius Erasmus in around 1500.

It is now a fundamental principle of modern health care and inherent within health and social care strategies across the UK (See: England, Northern Ireland, Scotland, Wales ). Prevention is about tackling the upstream causes of ill health, this in itself is not controversial. The challenge is how it is paid for.

See: King’s Fund – Prevention is better than cure, except when it comes to paying for it, The results are not easily measured, because it is not easy to see where illness has not occurred. The UK has a rich history of focusing on prevention, from Edward Jenner’s smallpox vaccine in 1796 to John Snow using data analytics to determine the cause of the cholera outbreak in 1854.

While there has been huge progress across many public health trends, life expectancy in the UK has stalled and in some parts of the UK, has even decreased. There are worrying trends in health inequalities, with an unprecedented reversal in life expectancy for some groups and stark inequalities between healthy life expectancy between the most and least deprived areas.

Increasing rates of alcohol and drugs-related deaths and hospitalisations, STIs, and obesity and a shift in the pattern of ill health towards multiple health conditions are also indicative of the need for action. Nursing is essentially about providing quality evidence-based care and support to individuals and populations to improve health and well-being throughout life.

In the past, public health has been seen as a niche specialty far removed from the typical image of nursing and only practiced by those with very specific qualifications. Nursing and midwifery staff are now increasingly recognised as instrumental in improving and supporting the public’s health at an individual, community and population level.

All nursing and midwifery staff are well placed to do this and need to embrace the contribution they can make to prevention. The ongoing challenge is having enough staff with the skills and time to make this essential contribution. The RCN have been campaigning for many years for a greater focus on prevention with adequate funding.

1. This is particularly pertinent in England, following the transfer of funding for public health to local authorities in 2013 and thereafter significant year on year cuts to local authority budgets and to the public health grant.
2. The RCN welcomed the announcement in the recent 2019 spending review of a real terms increase to the public health grant, which we see as a step in the right direction.

However, indications are that the increase will likely fall short of the amount needed to offset the years of cuts and is not based on an assessment of population need. Improving public health and preventing ill health is about more than health services; and requires action to address the wider determinants of health, for example, education, transport and employment, which need to be addressed alongside health services in a more systematic way and with cross-government action and investment.

The RCN’s commitment is for a properly funded cross-government prevention strategy with a nursing workforce who are able to deliver this. We are calling for a long term sustainable investment in public health and prevention, which is based on assessment of population need and an understanding of health inequalities.

The RCN has key alliances with a number of organisations to support lobbying on public health. For example we are members of the Alcohol Health Alliance who have recently called for £1 billion spent in tax to alcohol industry to be spent on funding 40,000 nurse vacancies.

Who gave the quote Prevention is better than cure?

Prevention is better than cure – Matt Hancock’s speech to IANPHI We’re here to talk prevention. And if there’s one thing that everybody knows it’s: ‘prevention is better than cure’. When I was thinking about prevention I looked into where this comes from. I’m told it was Erasmus, the 16th century Dutch philosopher, who coined the insight.

• The irony was that Erasmus died suddenly from an attack of dysentery, which we now know is a wholly preventable condition.
• The other person who can lay claim was Benjamin Franklin, who said: ‘an ounce of prevention is better than a pound of cure’.
• And Franklin founded the first fire brigade in Philadelphia and made it one of the safest cities for fires in the world.

So prevention works. As the founding fathers knew.

1. Prevention saves lives and saves money.
2. Two of the biggest health successes of the 20th century had prevention at their core: vaccination and cutting smoking.
3. In the UK, both were achieved by careful and considered government intervention.
4. We didn’t outlaw cigarettes because blanket bans curtail personal freedoms and often have the opposite effect.
5. We encouraged better behaviour through informing the public and by stopping smoking in public places where it could affect the health of others.

We didn’t compel people to vaccinate against their will. We helped them see it was in their interests and everybody else’s too. Ultimately, at the heart of our public provision for healthcare there’s a social contract. A social contract at the heart of our NHS.

• We, the citizens, have a right to the healthcare we need, when we need it, free at the point of use.
• But, we have a responsibility to pay our taxes to fund it, and to use the health service carefully, with consideration for others, and to comply with medical advice to look after ourselves.
• Because the NHS is not just a service – it’s a shared stake in society.

Too much of the health debate in England has been about our rights: what we deserve, and what the NHS can deliver. And, of course, those rights are important. But, I think we need to pay more attention to our responsibilities, as well as our rights. Today, I want to talk about those responsibilities, and our task for the National Health Service to help empower people to take more care of their own health.

1. I want to talk about how we need to focus more on prevention to transform our health and social care system, save money, eliminate waste and make the extra £20.5 billion we’re putting in go as far as it can.
2. Because only with better prevention can our NHS be sustainable in the long term.
3. Over just the last year, emergency admissions at A&E have increased by 6.6%.

This rate of growth of demand is simply unsustainable. But, of course, it’s not just about the finances. I want to talk about how preventing ill health can transform lives, and transform society for the better too. That might sound radical. It is intended to.

1. The government-wide plan we are publishing today sets out how we need a radical shift in how the NHS sees itself, from a hospital service for the ill, to a nationwide service to keep us healthy.
2. Where those who work on the front line of the NHS including the GPs, who are its bedrock, feel confident to remind people of their responsibilities too.
3. So first, let’s talk about those responsibilities.

At the core of my political philosophy is a belief that the state has a duty to protect the most vulnerable in society, and an equally firm belief that we must empower people to fulfil their potential to be the best they possibly can be. From the education they receive in school, to the freedom they have to achieve in work.

• And nowhere is this more true than with health.
• Given this duty, our starting point is to ask: what contributes to living longer in good health?
• The Prime Minister has set this question as part of the Ageing Grand Challenge – to seek 5 years’ longer healthy life expectancy by 2035.
• The best evidence points to a 4-factor breakdown.

Around a quarter of what leads to longer healthier life is acute care – or what goes on in hospitals. The second factor is genetics. The third factor is environmental – things like air quality that an individual can’t control.

1. And the final factor is what people do – the choices they make, the lifestyle they choose.
2. Different people put different proportions on these 4 factors: but suffice to say they’re all important.
3. Yet currently, we spend the overwhelming majority of the £115 billion NHS budget on acute care.
4. Last year, we spent just £11 billion on primary care where the bulk of prevention happens.
5. Yet the combination of prevention and predictive medicine have more than twice the impact on length of healthy life.
6. That isn’t just the difference between life and death, it’s the difference between spending the last 20 years of your life fit and active, or in a chronic condition.

So our focus must shift from treating single acute illnesses to promoting the health of the whole individual. And from prevention across the population as a whole to targeted, predictive prevention. So as the government is spending £20.5 billion more of taxpayers’ hard-earned cash over the next 5 years – the single, largest cash injection to the NHS ever – we must see the proportion of funding on primary and community care in the NHS rise.

• And that is exactly what will happen in the long-term plan.
• But it isn’t just about the quantum of money.
• It’s also about reform.
• I want to see people taking greater personal responsibility for managing their own health.
• For looking after themselves better, so staying active and stopping smoking.
• Now, I want to address head on how we can do this without undermining people’s liberty.

Take alcohol. Like many people, I enjoy the odd glass of wine. I support the budget in which we froze duty on scotch and beer. I don’t believe in punishing the masses to target those who need help. Yet alcohol abuse puts a huge burden on the NHS. High-risk drinkers make up less than 5% of the population, but consume over a third of all alcohol.

1. They’re more likely to end up in A&E.
2. And drunk people are more likely to be responsible for abuse and violent attacks on NHS staff.
3. I’ve seen it for myself.
4. So we need action on alcohol that targets those who most need our support, without punishing those who don’t.
5. Likewise, we know that smoking contributes to 4% of all hospital admissions in England each year.

And smoking costs the NHS around £2.5 billion each year. And this is despite the massive reduction in smoking over the past 30 years. For smoking, the next step towards a zero-smoking society is highly targeted anti-smoking interventions, especially in hospitals.

If someone is admitted as a heart patient, and we know that stopping smoking could save their life, then we will do everything we can to help them quit, as they do in Ottawa. This is a Canadian model I like the look of. I want to see bedside interventions in our hospitals so smokers who are patients are offered medication, behavioural support and follow-up checks when they go home.

And we need to fulfil our commitments to the obesity strategy, and set ambitious targets also on salt. Salt intake has fallen by 11% in under a decade, but if salt intake fell by a third it would prevent 8,000 premature deaths and save the NHS over £500 million annually.

1. So we are working on new solutions to tackle salt and will set out more details by Easter.
2. Because focusing on the responsibilities of patients shouldn’t be about penalising people but about helping people to make better choices.
3. How do we do that? How can we empower people to take more care of their own health? By giving people the knowledge, skills and confidence to take responsibility for their own health.

By using new digital technologies, to help people make informed decisions, with more access to primary and community care, and with more social prescribing, all aimed at stopping people from becoming patients in the first place. So the second thing I want to talk about is how we must focus more on prevention to transform our health and social care system to save money, eliminate waste and get the best return on our extra £20.5 billion.

1. This isn’t just about empowering people to take more personal responsibility.
2. It’s about reforming the system and harnessing new opportunities.
3. There are 2 new technologies in particular with the potential to change everything: the combination of artificial intelligence and genomics.
4. They promise the potential to unlock our genetic codes; and allow us to apply those codes to how we live our lives.

To predict which of us are susceptible to which illnesses, to diagnose those already ill, faster, and to develop new tailor-made treatments to bring people back to health. Together, they will transform medicine. We are finally now able to crack that genetic factor of our health.

We can intervene earlier. Save money on unnecessary and invasive tests. Eliminate waste by prescribing the right medication or the right treatment the first time round. And save NHS resources for people who really need it. And this isn’t something that’s far off in the future. It’s already happening. The new NHS Genomic Medicine Service is expanding.

In Cambridge, we’re at the cusp of sequencing the 100,000th genome, and are now aiming to sequence 5 million so we can diagnose rare diseases, more quickly and with fewer painful tests for patients. The world-leading Moorfields Eye Hospital is working with the world-leading AI company Deepmind.

1. Their AI system has made the correct diagnosis on over 50 different eye diseases with 94% accuracy – at least matching the best human experts.
2. And that figure is only going to improve.
3. These technologies, and other new digital services giving targeted health advice, are starting to transform global medicine.

As it has been with every wave of technology for the last 70 years, the NHS must be at the forefront, embracing these new technologies and shaping them as they evolve and improve. The NHS must go from being the world’s biggest buyer of fax machines to the tech pioneers of the future.

• From 1796 when Edward Jenner developed the first smallpox vaccine, to 1928 when Alexander Fleming discovered penicillin, to 1950 when Richard Doll proved the link between smoking and cancer.
• The next frontier of prevention is using the data at our disposal to predict who will be ill with what, and to get in there early.
• The Prime Minister has spoken with great eloquence about the power of artificial intelligence to save lives by spotting cancer earlier – and we must do that.
• But predictive prevention has a far broader application.

From diagnosing a susceptibility to dementia due to a vitamin deficiency, to motivating activity to tackle obesity, we can have better, more targeted interventions than ever before. Again, giving better results, and helping the NHS eliminate waste and save money.

• Our aim is to prevent people becoming patients through personalised advice and intervention.
• Public Health England are leading the way on predictive prevention.
• They are bringing together a range of experts so we can scale up this pioneering work to a national level.
• Now, I’ve talked about acute care, genetics, and choices.

So let’s turn to the final factor in determining a healthy lifespan: the environment. And this is linked to my third and final point: how getting prevention right will transform society for the better. Right now, we tend to think of things in isolation.

Pollution is seen as an environmental problem. Employment is something for the Treasury to worry about. And housing is either a public good or a private investment. But health can’t work in isolation. Our health is affected by each and every one of those. So a true focus on prevention means tackling the environmental factors that affect a person’s health too.

It means a new drive for clean air, building on the successes of recent years in cutting emissions. Secure employment, building on the record number of jobs available now. Higher quality housing. And it also means our GP surgeries, our hospitals, our care homes, our entire health and care system working more closely with local authorities, schools, businesses, charities and all the other parts that make up our communities.

• It means employers playing a bigger role in helping their staff stay healthy and to return to health after illness.
• And we can learn from the excellent work of our military here.
• Soldiers have an 85% return-to-work rate after a serious injury, and they obviously have some very serious injuries.
• The equivalent rate for civilians is only 35%.

The reason why the military is better at getting people back to work is because they are more engaged in their workers’ recovery at every stage of the process. Civilian employers must do the same. Employers have a responsibility to help improve the health of their staff and the nation.

1. To achieve this we need to strengthen the links between employers, their unwell staff, and the NHS.
2. That way, the challenge – for I never think of people as problems – doesn’t present itself at 3am at A&E.
3. Good health starts with the right pre-natal care, immunisation, nutritional support, fitness advice, minimising social media and mental health harms, secure employment, financial independence, safe housing, help with bad habits, friends and family to fight loneliness, careful and considered interventions at every stage of life into old age.
4. From cradle to grave, not just for the NHS, but for the whole of society.

Giving people responsibility for their own health. Empowering them to make the right decisions. The best help when they need help. That is what getting prevention right means. That is the potential of prevention. That is the promise that it offers: a healthier, happier future for us all. : Prevention is better than cure – Matt Hancock’s speech to IANPHI

What is a famous Churchill quote?

“Never Give In” – “This is the lesson: never give in, never give in, never, never, never, never—in nothing, great or small, large or petty—never give in except to convictions of honour and good sense. Never yield to force; never yield to the apparently overwhelming might of the enemy.” —Harrow School, 29 October 1941.

Who wrote the quote good better best?

St. Jerome – Good, better, best.

Who said prevention is worth a pound of cure?

Ounce of prevention, pound of cure Benjamin Franklin famously advised fire-threatened Philadelphians in 1736 that “An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.” Clearly, preventing fires is better than fighting them, but to what extent can we protect ourselves from natural disasters? Hazards such as earthquakes, tsunamis, floods, hurricanes and volcanic eruptions are not in themselves preventable, but some of their devastating effects could be reduced through forward planning.

1. It’s important to be able to recover resiliently from disasters and, as part of this, it’s vital to identify the vulnerabilities of communities living in hazard-prone regions,” explained Michael Ramage from the Centre for Risk in the Built Environment (CURBE).
2. By putting resources into resilience and building back better, communities can reduce the risk of disastrous consequences should a similar event reoccur.” Now, thanks to an information system that Cambridge researchers developed originally for tracking how regions recover from disasters, communities could soon have the means to understand how best to protect themselves from future catastrophes.

The story begins in Haiti, where CURBE researcher Daniel Brown has been working over the past year with the British Red Cross and the United Nations following the devastating earthquake in 2010, which killed 316,000, displaced 1.3 million and destroyed almost 100,000 houses.

• In a country that was deeply impoverished before the earthquake, people continue to live under tarpaulins exposed to safety and security risks, with limited access to water, livelihoods and key services.
• Brown travelled to the country to field-test a system that he and colleagues at Cambridge Architectural Research (CAR) and ImageCat had developed during the previous four years as a mapping technique for tracking post-disaster recovery.

With funding from the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC), Brown had identified a suite of 12 ‘performance indicators’ spanning core recovery sectors extracted from high-resolution satellite imagery. He used these to map the recovery process in Ban Nam Khem, Thailand, after the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, and Muzaffarabad, Pakistan, after the 2005 Kashmir earthquake, by looking at aspects such as the movement of populations, the construction of dwellings, the accessibility of roads, and the loss and rebuilding of livelihoods.

In Thailand and Pakistan, the system had already proved to be extremely useful. Brown’s work provided data and results that assisted decision making and had the potential to ensure the recovery process was both transparent and accountable. In Haiti, the EPSRC-funded follow-on project aimed to fine-tune the performance indicators within operational situations to suit the workflow of aid agencies.

What Brown found, however, was that in the complex and dynamic situation that follows a disaster, agencies desperately needed a real-time system to help them decide where to put resources. “Many of the hundreds of maps produced within the first week of the Haiti earthquake were soon out of date because of the changeability of the situation,” he explained.

“There was also a massive duplication of effort, with agencies often lacking trained staff to ensure the right information about buildings and people was acquired at the right time.” Dr Stephen Platt, Chairman of CAR, who has also been working on the project, described how these findings confirmed the results of a survey the team had previously carried out: “Agencies told us that they lack coordinated mapping information on where displaced populations have gone and where they have begun to return to, as well as damage to livelihoods, and rehabilitation of homes and infrastructure.

It’s very hard for them to decide where to put funds to the best effect for positive and resilient change.” Brown’s first task was a remote analysis of the affected area from his office in Cambridge, using pre-disaster satellite imagery together with a new technique based on high-resolution oblique aerial photographs that capture views of the façade of buildings, and Lidar, which measures building height.

On his arrival in Haiti, he identified which of the performance indicators was relevant for planning and used these to gather field information on the state of buildings, the socioeconomic impact on people, the safest places to rebuild and the community’s views. All data were integrated into a single database to aid the design of a rebuilding programme.

“We were delighted to find that the information system can be used for all phases of the disaster cycle, from preparedness through to damage assessment, then planning and finally recovery monitoring. You could think of each phase comprising a single module in the database.

All these phases are effectively interrelated with each other – data produced during one phase can be used in another phase. So when we collected damage data, these could be used as a baseline to inform planning, and so on,” explained Brown. Ramage, Principal Investigator for the follow-on project, added: “You can see how a system that can be used to predict where future vulnerabilities might be in a community is so important.

And, through Steve’s work in New Zealand, Chile and Italy, we have learnt more about how governments and agencies in developed countries are currently responding to disasters, which has allowed us to learn more about how our system and ideas might be adapted for different contexts.”

Echoing this, Dr Emily So, Director of CURBE, explained how the project fitted into what’s been called the disaster management cycle: “Governments and agencies think in terms of mitigation, preparedness, response and recovery.What we are trying to do in our research – which builds on 25 years of work in this area in the Department of Architecture under the leadership of Professor Robin Spence – is to make sure that we not only do reactive groundwork after the disaster but also proactive work, to mitigate and prepare ahead of the event and reduce the risk of disaster.”The team has recently been awarded funding for a two-year project involving eight global institutions with the remit of using satellite remote sensing to understand risk and vulnerabilities in communities around the world, under the European Commission’s Seventh Framework Programme.

“The hazard itself is not what creates the disaster,” added So. “It’s the quality of the housing and the social fabric. This is where CURBE can help in terms of assessing exposure and proposing methods of evaluating it. Better information means better ideas, means better protection.” For more information, please contact Louise Walsh () at the University of Cambridge Office of External Affairs and Communications.

What is Walt Disney’s famous quote?

The Best Quotes from Walt Disney About Life, Courage, and Imagination Walt Disney, the namesake of and creator of Mickey Mouse, was always sharing motivation and inspiration through his words. Lucky for us, we can still find encouragement from his and apply them to our lives today.

• “All our dreams can come true, if we have the courage to pursue them.”
• “It’s kind of fun to do the impossible.”
• “The way to get started is to quit talking and begin doing.”

“That’s the real trouble with the world. Too many people grow up.” “Why worry? If you’ve done the very best you can, then worrying won’t make it any better.”

1. “If you can dream it, you can do it.”
2. “Laughter is timeless, imagination has no age, and dreams are forever.”
3. “Ideas come from curiosity.”
4. “The more you are in a state of gratitude, the more you will attract things to be grateful for.”
5. “When you believe in a thing, believe in it all the way, implicitly and unquestionable.”
6. “When you’re curious, you find lots of interesting things to do.”
7. WATCH: The Best Disney Quotes About Life, Love, and Friendship
8. “In bad times and in good, I’ve never lost my sense of zest for life.”

“First, think. Second, believe. Third, dream. And finally, dare.” “We keep moving forward, opening new doors, and doing new things, because we’re curious and curiosity keeps leading us down new paths.” “Everyone falls down. Getting back up is how you learn how to walk.” “The difference between winning and losing is most often not quitting.” “Whatever you do, do it well.” Thanks for your feedback! : The Best Quotes from Walt Disney About Life, Courage, and Imagination

What is Disney’s famous quote?

‘ All our dreams can come true, if we have the courage to pursue them. ‘ – Walt Disney.

What is Mark Twain most famous quote?

Never put off till tomorrow what you can do the day after tomorrow.

What is a famous quote from Shakespeare?

No legacy is so rich as honesty. The web of our life is of a mingled yarn, good and ill together. All’s well that ends well, still the fine’s the crown; Whate’er the course, the end is the renown.