Moving Beyond “Special Needs”. A FunctionBased Framework for Emergency Management and Planning

Disaster preparation and emergency response processes, procedures, and systems can be made more ef-fective for people with disabilities, as well as for the population as a whole. An essential element of build-ing appropriate levels of capacity, specific planning, and response success is to move beyond use of the “special needs ” category, to better identify and address the diverse needs of those included under this label. This article provides disability demographics and describes special needs populations to lay the foundation for this change. It suggests the development of a more accurate and flexible planning and response framework based on essential, sometimes overlapping, functional needs: communication, medical needs, maintaining functional independence, supervision, and transportation (C-MIST). It also proposes new approaches to functional support, leadership, service delivery, and training. ognize and meet their needs in an emergency. As it is widely used within disaster services and the emergency management field, the term special needs generally includes an extremely broad group of people, including people with disabilities, peo-ple with serious mental illness, minority groups, non–English speakers, children, and the elderly (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention [CDC], 2004). Other lists add single working parents, people without vehicles, people with special dietary needs (Federal Emergency Management Agency [FEMA], 2004), pregnant women, prisoners, people who are homeless, and others. While there appears to be little consensus on ex-actly who should be included in the special needs category, these groups represent a large and complex variety of concerns and challenges for disaster planning and response. Many of these groups have little in common beyond the fact that they are often left out of programs, services, and emergency plan-ning (Kailes, 2000; National Council on Disability, 2005). We conducted a demographic analysis to estimate th