Disaster medicine and public health preparedness
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In a public health emergency, many more patients could require mechanical ventilators than can be accommodated. ⋯ New York State released the draft guidelines for public comment, allowing for revision to reflect both community values and medical innovation. This ventilator triage system represents a radical shift from ordinary standards of care, and may serve as a model for allocating other scarce resources in disasters.
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The ability to monitor assistance, define humanitarian needs, and approach equity in the distribution of assistance has lagged behind the world's growing commitment to responding to humanitarian emergencies. This article highlights relevant data sources to elucidate elements of an operational definition of humanitarian need. New and refined measures are proposed to assist in assessing the level of need among affected populations. An original measure that combines data on conflict and disasters to summarize the cumulative magnitude of 4 types of humanitarian threats is presented.
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Disaster Med Public Health Prep · Sep 2007
Developing a consensus framework for an effective and efficient disaster response health system: a national call to action.
Eighteen national organizations, representing medicine, dentistry, nursing, hospital systems, public health, and emergency medical services, have worked together to create a framework for a national and regional disaster response health system that is scalable, multidisciplinary, and seamless, and based on an all-hazards approach. In July 2005 and June 2006 the American Medical Association (AMA) and the American Public Health Association (APHA) convened the AMA/APHA Linkages Leadership Summit, with funding from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention under the Terrorism Injuries: Information Dissemination and Exchange (TIIDE) program. As cofacilitators, James J. ⋯ The full summit report contains 53 consensus-based recommendations, which will serve as the framework for a coordinated national agenda for strengthening health system preparedness for terrorism and other disasters. The 9 most overarching critical recommendations from the report are highlighted here. Although the summit report presents important perspectives on the subject of preparedness for public health emergencies, we must understand that preparedness is a process and that these recommendations must be reviewed and refined continually over time.