BACKGROUND Bam earthquake was the most catastrophic natural disasters in recent years. The aim of this study was to review different aspects of crisis management during and after the catastrophic earthquake in Bam City, Iran. METHODS Data needed for this systematic review were collected through searching PubMed, EMBASE and SID databases, for the period from 2003 to 2011. Keywords included ear...

Background: The direct and indirect effects of the economic crisis in Greece have resulted in inequalities, poverty and unemployment. Public health services, social care and welfare have been both severely curtailed and overstretched by increased demand due to higher private care costs and the refugee crisis. For society’s most vulnerable this is beyond an economic crisis, it is a humanitarian ...

Technological advances in both distributed cooperative work and web-map services have the potential to support distributed and collaborative time-critical decision-making for crisis response. We address this potential through the theoretical perspective of distributed cognition and apply this perspective to development of a geocollaborationenabled web application that supports coordinated crisi...

Serious games are an effective tool for giving players a hands-on, immersive experience of crisis situations. To simplify the design of such games while ensuring their relevance, we propose a design method that is based on reference tasks. The feasibility of this approach is demonstrated by the improved design of the serious game “Disaster in my Backyard” that has been played during ISCRAM Summ...

The preparation and dissemination of policy statements are necessary but insufficient to prevent the inappropriate use of infant-feeding products in emergencies. The widespread failure of humanitarian agencies operating in the Balkan crisis to act in accordance with international policies and recommendations provides a recent example of the failure to translate infant-feeding policies into prac...

In recent risk studies, some researchers have raised concerns regarding the focus on extraordinary events-sometimes called " extreme paradigm " (Gaillard, 2007). Simultaneously, we are witnessing a growing interest in the more " ordinary " situations that must be handled on a daily basis in order to avoid crises (Roux-Dufort 2007, Van Laere 2013). In an interdisciplinary perspective of sociolog...

Using complex emergencies and the humanitarian response to them as its point of reference, this paper provides a critique of relief, development and the linking -debate. Rather than being autonomous, relief is a developmental idea. Development concepts have proven incapable of understanding permanent emergency. They also underestimates the extent of the North's institutional accommodation with ...

The use of microblogging platforms such as Twitter during crises has become widespread. More importantly, information disseminated by affected people contains useful information like reports of missing and found people, requests for urgent needs etc. For rapid crisis response, humanitarian organizations look for situational awareness information to understand and assess the severity of the cris...