Beyond Flooded Homes: Household Financial Resilience, Healthcare Access, and Economic Recovery After Disasters—Lessons from the 2025 Hat Yai Flood
Abstract
Flood disasters can affect household welfare through simultaneous losses of income and assets, disruption of healthcare, and increased expenditure required for recovery. These pressures are commonly examined in separate literatures on disaster economics, household coping, financial protection, and health-system resilience. This paper brings them together around a household-level problem: competing claims on limited resources after a disaster.
We propose a conceptual framework in which disaster-related economic losses and healthcare disruption converge on household financial-buffer capacity. When resources are insufficient, households may continue to obtain healthcare and experience financial hardship, delay or forgo care and experience unmet need, or move between these responses as disruption persists. Continuity-dependent healthcare can amplify this constraint by reducing the flexibility to postpone healthcare use or expenditure.
The 2025 Hat Yai flood in Southern Thailand illustrates the upstream conditions represented in the framework. Available evidence documents widespread livelihood and productive-asset losses alongside disruption of essential healthcare services, including dialysis. Household-level evidence is not yet available to determine the extent of catastrophic health expenditure, forgone care, or longer-term welfare loss following the flood.
The framework suggests three policy priorities: protecting the continuity of essential and non-deferrable care, providing rapid and flexible household liquidity, and linking health protection with livelihood recovery and social protection. Disaster resilience depends not only on restoring services, but also on whether households retain the economic capacity to use them while rebuilding their lives and livelihoods.
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