Optimizing Knowledge Management During Crises

Background

Disasters and crises happen unexpectedly and can range from weather related storms and mechanical failures to economic collapse or pandemics. Throughout history, humans have dealt poorly with the largely unexplainable, and frequently unexpected, spreads of diseases and other crises. Tales from ancient times describe death and traumatized survival but contain little useful information about how healers dealt effectively with widespread health crises. Only in the past 300 years have sciences, technologies, and practices of medical, nursing, and epidemiological public health been developed to help understand and manage pandemics rationally. Yet, individual vaccination and hygienic practices, as well as effective adherence to preventive societal behavioral norms, continue to fall short in containing the infections that plague human populations. This is largely because of deep misunderstanding and misinformation about the rapidly evolving mutations of disease (Kulikowski, 2021). It is critical to support healthcare professionals and the population in reducing the risk of human-to-human transmission, or unintended harm, in order to decrease secondary infections or unsafe conditions among patients and healthcare professionals (Lai et al., 2020). Therefore, providing knowledge to people during a crisis is imperative.

Knowledge can be defined as understanding, experience, insight, intuition, contextualized information, or know how. It is based on information, which is contextualized and condensed data, or unorganized facts and figures (Deliu, 2020). Knowledge management can be viewed as the process of identifying, capturing, storing, sharing, applying, and leveraging collective knowledge to improve performance (Archanjo de Souza et al., 2020; Giraldo et al., 2019; Wang, 2011). It can help organize and coordinate management actions, including quickly identifying knowledge owners and transferring the required knowledge to decision-makers who deal with crises when needed (Archanjo de Souza et al., 2020; Wang, 2011). Disaster management aims to reduce or avoid the potential losses from hazards, assure prompt and appropriate assistance to victims of disaster, and achieve rapid and effective recovery (Ammirato et al. 2020). Knowledge management can enhance the process of disaster management, through ensuring the availability and accessibility of accurate and reliable disaster risk information when required, through effective lesson learning (Seneviratne et al. 2010).