Search

Disaster preparedness is a major but necessary undertaking for every health care facility. The 2019 coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2) provided an unforeseen opportunity to compare the response of two radiology departments, University Health System A (UHSA) and University Health System B (UHSAB). Preparing for this disaster was unique since though unexpected, was thought to be detected early enough to allow for sufficient preparation. Unlike many other disasters which are short-term, single events, this has been an on-going event. Changes at both health systems included workflow alterations for exposure reduction to faculty, trainees, and staff. UHSA was able to quickly divert workflow to previously deployed home workstations, while University of Utah Health Sciences Center required 2 to 3 weeks to procure and initialize enough remote workstations to significantly affect departmental operations. Other measures such as universal masking, temperature screening at facility entrances, virtual appointments, and physical barriers were used by both systems to limit patient-to-patient, patient-to-staff, staff-to-patient, and staff-staff physical interaction to help decrease exposure risk. The goal of these preparations is to allow each department to fulfill imaging needs in support of the organizational clinical mission with the flexibility to adapt to the unique and dynamic nature of this disaster.

Outdoor advertising has a long history of serving as a landmark of the experience economy. In the United States early signage often featured traveling shows and circuses. As the automobile changed lifestyle trends, billboards followed the new roading experience. Today, outdoor advertising is increasingly seen as a part of experiencing cities, clustered in entertainment districts. Through spatial reorganization, integration into the built environment, and the development of increasingly engaged technologies, outdoor advertising is adapting to the new experiences of urban life. Signage is being used in new ways to enhance the quality of life in places that are commonly associated with consuming goods and services. As a landmark of the experience economy, signage orients individuals to these locations by drawing attention to opportunities to eat, drink, and have fun.

Outdoor advertising proliferation and the development of land use regulations in Los Angeles illustrate the complicated nature of balancing the economic and physical aspects of urban development. Regulating outdoor advertising is part of a movement to control the spatial structure of the consumer economy and manage the appearance of the landscape through zoning. The efforts of planners to regulate outdoor advertising are frequently challenged legally or stalled by political indecision. The history of Los Angeles billboard regulation illuminates the financial demands for encouraging the spectacle of consumer landscapes as well as the persistent difficulty planners have had regulating urban appearance.

How people feel about places matters, especially in their neighborhood. It matters for their health, the health of their children, and their social cohesion and use of local resources. A growing body of research in public health, planning, psychology, and sociology bears out this point. Recently, a new methodological tack has been taken to find out how people feel about places. The sketch map, a once popular tool of behavioral geographers and environmental psychologists to understand how people perceive the structural aspects of places, is now being used in concert with geographic information systems (GIS) to capture and spatially analyze the emotional side of urban environmental perception. This confluence is generating exciting prospects for what we can learn about the characteristics of the urban environment that elicit emotion. However, due to the uncritical way this approach has been employed to date, excitement about the prospects must be tempered by the acknowledgement of its potential problems. In this paper we review the extant research on integrating sketch maps with GIS and then employ a case study of mapping youth fear in Los Angeles gang neighborhoods to demonstrate these prospects and the problems, particularly in the areas of (1) representation of environmental perception in GIS and (2) spatial analysis of these data. Keywords: sketch maps, geographic information systems (GIS), environmental perception, fear