Disaster medicine and public health preparedness
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Disaster Med Public Health Prep · Feb 2016
Evacuation of Intensive Care Units During Disaster: Learning From the Hurricane Sandy Experience.
Data on best practices for evacuating an intensive care unit (ICU) during a disaster are limited. The impact of Hurricane Sandy on New York City area hospitals provided a unique opportunity to learn from the experience of ICU providers about their preparedness, perspective, roles, and activities. ⋯ ICU providers who evacuated critically ill patients during Hurricane Sandy had little prior knowledge of evacuation processes or vertical evacuation experience. The weakest links in the patient evacuation process were communication and the availability of practical tools. Incorporating ICU providers into hospital evacuation planning and training, developing standard evacuation communication processes and tools, and collecting a uniform dataset among all evacuating hospitals could better inform critical care evacuation in the future.
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Disaster Med Public Health Prep · Feb 2016
Civil-Military Engagement: An Empirical Account of Humanitarian Perceptions of Civil-Military Coordination During the Response to Typhoon Haiyan.
This study sought to identify how humanitarian actors in natural disasters coordinate (or communicate) with the military to identify the needs of disaster-affected populations, identify how coordination should be undertaken for the delivery of relief goods, perceive the effectiveness of such coordination, perceive the role that training played in preparation for coordinating with the military and the effectiveness of this training, and view the overall civil-military engagement and its implications for the independence of the humanitarian sector. ⋯ Humanitarians felt that international militaries and the Philippines Armed Forces played an important role in ensuring that aid reached people in need, particularly in the early days of the response. However, less than half of the respondents were familiar with the Oslo Guidelines.
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Disaster Med Public Health Prep · Dec 2015
Identifying Indirect Benefits of Federal Health Care Emergency Preparedness Grant Funding to Coalitions: A Content Analysis.
This study aimed to identify the indirect benefits of health care preparedness funding as perceived by current and former recipients of the US Department of Health and Human Services Office of the Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response's Hospital Preparedness Program. ⋯ This study identified indirect benefits of federal investment in hospital and health care preparedness in day-to-day operations. Major categories of these benefits included dual-use technology and programs and impact of relationships on day-to-day operations. Coalition members placed a high value on these benefits, even though they were not direct outcomes of grant programs. Further research is needed to quantify the economic value of these indirect benefits to more accurately measure the total return on investment from federal grant funding.
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Disaster Med Public Health Prep · Dec 2015
Ambulance Dispatches From Unaffected Areas After the Great East Japan Earthquake: Impact on Emergency Care in the Unaffected Areas.
Although dispatching ambulance crews from unaffected areas to a disaster zone is inevitable when a major disaster occurs, the effect on emergency care in the unaffected areas has not been studied. We evaluated whether dispatching ambulance crews from unaffected prefectures to those damaged by the Great East Japan Earthquake was associated with reduced resuscitation outcomes in out-of-hospital cardiac arrest (OHCA) cases in the unaffected areas. ⋯ The dispatch of ambulances from unaffected prefectures to earthquake-stricken areas was associated with a subsequent decrease in the ROSC and 1-month survival rates in OHCA cases in the unaffected prefectures.
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Disaster Med Public Health Prep · Dec 2015
Notes from Nepal: Is There a Better Way to Provide Search and Rescue?
This article discusses a possibility for overcoming the limited efficiency of international search and rescue teams in saving lives after earthquakes, which was emphasized by the recent disaster in Nepal and in other earthquakes all over the world. Because most lives are actually saved by the locals themselves long before the international teams arrive on scene, many more lives could be saved by teaching the basics of light rescue to local students and citizens in threatened countries.