The social services risk index at local level: A tool for diagnosis and decision making

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic has had a decisive impact on our society, generating both direct and indirect effects in a multitude of dimensions, beyond the purely health-related, which have conditioned people’s well-being and quality of life. The social services system has played an essential role in absorbing the consequences of these impacts on the most socially vulnerable population. Analysing the social impacts and monitoring the risks derived from the pandemic can favour the prevention of risk situations, adjust the resources of the social services system to changing social realities and facilitate the strategic decision-making process to mitigate or minimise the impacts of potential socio-annual crises or catastrophes. This article presents a methodological process, based on the HCVRA (Hazards, Capacity Building, Vulnerability, Risk Assessment) disaster management models, designed ad hoc with the aim of identifying, on the one hand, the social impacts of COVID-19 and, on the other hand, the areas with the highest social risk in the post-COVID scenario. The application of this methodological process has made it possible to configure a set of indicators based on public databases, defined by consulting experts and weighted by a panel of stakeholders through a multi-criteria method to obtain a territorialised risk index at the highest level of disaggregation of the available data, based on the dimensions of vulnerability, threat and resilience.