Disaster medicine and public health preparedness
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Disaster Med Public Health Prep · Aug 2013
Competency-based standardized training for humanitarian providers: making humanitarian assistance a professional discipline.
The number of people employed in international humanitarian care is growing at a yearly rate of 6%. The demand for better coordination, accountability, and training has led to a need for standardized humanitarian training programs for providers. ⋯ This report explores the competencies specific to humanitarian training that are practice- and application-oriented, teachable, and measurable. Competency-based, standardized programs will be used to select humanitarian workers deployed in future crises and to guide the professionalization of this discipline.
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Disaster Med Public Health Prep · Aug 2013
Emergency response to mass casualty incidents in Lebanon.
The emergency response to mass casualty incidents in Lebanon lacks uniformity. Three recent large-scale incidents have challenged the existing emergency response process and have raised the need to improve and develop incident management for better resilience in times of crisis. We describe some simple emergency management principles that are currently applied in the United States. These principles can be easily adopted by Lebanon and other developing countries to standardize and improve their emergency response systems using existing infrastructure.
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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.
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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.
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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.