The landmark Humanitarian Response Review, commissioned by the United Nations Emergency Relief Coordinator in 2005, has catalyzed recent reforms in disaster response through the Inter-Agency Standing Committee. These reforms include a "cluster lead" approach to sectoral responsibilities and the strengthening of humanitarian coordination. Clinical medicine, public health, and disaster incident m...

While OGC’s WFS facilitates disseminating heterogeneous spatial data over the Web and allows feature-level geospatial information sharing and synchronization, performance issues challenge the efficient and effective utilization of WFS for disaster response. Literature shows that obtaining spatial information becomes very slow when querying WFS systems from large geospatial databases over the In...

Processes in disaster response management (DRM) and business processes are similar due to their general structure and goals. This encourages us to analyze the suitability of business process management tools and methods in the domain of DRM. One main challenge is the coverage of disaster specific aspects by existing process modeling languages. Since interdependencies between time, activities, a...

BACKGROUND Disaster medicine education is an enormous challenge, but indispensable for disaster preparedness. AIMS We aimed to develop and implement a disaster medicine curriculum for medical student education that can serve as a peer-reviewed, structured educational guide and resource. Additionally, the process of designing, approving and implementing such a curriculum is presented. METHOD...

The rescue and relief operations triggered by the September 11, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center in New York City demanded collaboration among hundreds of organisations. To shed light on the response to the September 11, 2001 attacks and help to plan and prepare the response to future disasters, we study the inter-organisational network that emerged in response to the attacks. Studying th...

At the 13th meeting of the European Society for Traumatic Stress Studies in 2013, a symposium was held that brought together international researchers and clinicians who were involved in psychosocial responses to disaster. A total of six disasters that occurred in five countries were presented and discussed. Lessons learned from these disasters included the need to: (1) tailor the psychosocial ...

In this essay, we would like to pragmatically and realistically introduce three topics: (a) Within the hospital, critical care is acknowledged as an enormous cost driver that becomes even less manageable during a disaster response scenario. It is widely recognised that hospital critical care capabilities for large scale disaster response require significant increases, but an overarching plan to...

Due to the interconnectedness of the world today and the ease with which infectious diseases can spread globally, collaboration within and among countries around the world on pandemic planning and response is immensely important. One of the fi rst steps for pandemic planning involves identifying existing gaps in a nation's current plans, and examining previous outbreaks for lessons learned. To ...

The underlying goal of disaster aftercare is to contribute to the restoration of control at both individual and societal level. A disaster HIA may contribute to a pro-active government response by providing information on the needs of the victims and, consequently, on the relief facilities required to support individual and collective post-disaster care activities. It may also serve to recogniz...