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Institute for Crisis, Disaster, and Risk Management Crisis and Emergency Management Newsletter Website |
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November
2008
Volume
15
- Number 2 |
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The Healthcare Sector and Emergency Preparedness By: Janna Baker First responders
and specifically What is the role of the healthcare sector in a disaster, be it natural or intentional? Certainly, medical care is just one aspect of the many needs of a community after disaster strikes. In most circumstances health professionals alone can not and should not take a lead operational role in the management. However, a sophisticated understanding of the unique aspects of emergency preparedness and disaster response can enhance not only its primary functions but can augment the community response as a whole. The medical arm of initial disaster response plays a well-understood role in not only medical treatment but rescue operations and, at times, disaster identification and notification. For the healthcare facility-based care, the primary function is to identify and treat injury and illness of the human body. In a disaster, the expectation is that healthcare professionals understand the unique malignant forces that may occur from the particular disaster (or cause the particular disaster, as the case may be.) Additionally, it is crucial to know how to treat not just one person with a particular problem but potentially tens, hundreds, or thousands of people—a scale of practice not typically undertaken in the normal day-to-day workings of the profession. If the public trusts its healthcare providers to know how and be able to carry out the required medical care, this can be of immense psychosocial benefit in times of unusual uncertainty and disrupted normalcy. On closer examination, the boundaries between community needs in a disaster become fuzzy and are far from absolute. Medical care quickly becomes public health focused, which includes the need for water, food, shelter, and sanitation. This easily transitions in to concerns for transportation, security and communication modalities, as well as governmental response. Longer term, medical and public health care ties directly to worker productivity, physical and mental health maintenance, and community recovery. This can be seen in the FEMA’s National Response Framework1. Public Health and Medical Services has its own separate Emergency Support Function annex (ESF-8). This function is broadly defined as, “Public Health, Medical, Mental Health Services, and Mass Fatality Management.” ESF-6, “Mass Care, Emergency Assistance, Housing, and Human Services” also speaks in part to First Aid and support to medical shelters, and ESF-9, entitled “Search and Rescue”, details the support functions of life-saving operations and search and rescue. The prehospital, hospital, and outpatient portions of the healthcare industry play a role in all these areas. An informed healthcare sector has a unique opportunity to influence and serve the community in all phases of disaster preparedness and response. In the various drills and exercises we carry out as we prepare for the known and unknown possibilities, a quote comes to mind, “In a crisis, you will not rise to the occasion but rather default to your level of training.2” Training and education can help ensure that in times of disaster, the healthcare sector is able to execute its critical community responsibility, in the pre-hospital setting and beyond. ____________________________________ 1
FEMA National Response Framework Resource
Center. http://www.fema.gov/emergency/nrf/ Accessed 9 October
2008. 2Robert Boatman. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=idzqJ6TFH9Y Accessed 9 October 2008. |