Disaster medicine and public health preparedness
-
Disaster Med Public Health Prep · Jun 2013
A brief report of surveillance of traumatic experiences and exposures after the earthquake-tsunami in American Samoa, 2009.
Rapid mental health surveillance during the acute phase of a disaster response can inform the allocation of limited clinical resources and provide essential household-level risk estimates for recovery planning. ⋯ The combination of evidence-based mental health triage and community assessment gave hospital-based providers, local public health officials, and federal response teams a strategy to match limited clinical resources with survivors at greatest risk. Also, it produced a common operating picture of acute and chronic mental health needs among disaster systems of care operating in American Samoa.
-
Disaster Med Public Health Prep · Jun 2013
Major incident experience and preparedness in a developing country.
Research shows that having previous experience of major incidents has a positive impact on awareness and preparedness of organizations. We investigated the effects of major incident experience on preparedness of health organizations on future disasters in Iran. ⋯ Our findings showed that to increase system efficiency and effectiveness within health organizations, an appropriate major incident management system is needed. The new system can use lessons learned from previous major incidents to better equip health organizations to cope with similar events in the future.
-
Disaster Med Public Health Prep · Jun 2013
Successful strategies for recruitment of emergency medical volunteers.
A robust medical volunteer program is critical to ensuring a successful response to public health and medical emergencies. The New York City (NYC) Department of Health and Mental Hygiene created the NYC Medical Reserve Corps in 2003 to build a multidisciplinary team of health professionals who wish to assist NYC with response during large-scale health emergencies. This article reports on the search to determine which recruitment activities have been most successful to date, with the goal of modeling future activities upon those that worked best. ⋯ The local health commissioner or other trusted community figure is an excellent messenger for recruiting emergency volunteers. It is also critical that recruitment messages reach as many potential volunteers as possible to ensure that the requisite number of volunteers and mix of professional disciplines are identified.
-
Disaster Med Public Health Prep · Jun 2013
Information technology systems for critical care triage and medical response during an influenza pandemic: a review of current systems.
To assess local, state, federal, and global pandemic influenza preparedness by identifying pandemic plans at the local, state, federal, and global levels, and to identify any information technology (IT) systems in these plans to support critical care triage during an influenza pandemic in the Canadian province of Ontario. ⋯ Although several pandemic plans have been drafted, the majority are high-level general documents that do not describe IT systems. The plans that discuss IT systems focus strongly on surveillance, which fails to recognize the needs of a health care system responding to an influenza pandemic. The best examples of the types of IT systems to guide decision making during a pandemic were found in the Kansas and the Czech Republic pandemic plans, because these systems were designed to collect both patient and surveillance data. Although Ontario has yet to develop such an IT system, several IT systems are in place that could be leveraged to support critical care triage and medical response during an influenza pandemic.