It has been more than a decade since emergency medicine became recognized as a specialty in the Kingdom of Bahrain. In the last fifteen years emergency medicine has widely established itself and developed rapidly in the Kingdom. The three main emergency departments are: Salmanyia Medical Complex (SMC), Royal Medical Services of Bahrain Defence Force (RMS-BDF) and King Hamad University Hospital ...

Recent disasters have shown that having clearly defined preventive procedures and decisions is a critical component that minimizes evacuation hazards and ensures a rapid and successful evolution of evacuation plans. In this context, we present our Situation-Aware System for enhancing Evacuation Plans (SASEP) system, which allows creating end-user business rules that technically support the spec...

The evacuation of complex buildings is a challenge under any circumstances. Fire drills are a way of training and validating evacuation plans. However, sometimes these plans are not taken seriously by their participants. It is also difficult to have the financial and time resources required. In this scenario, serious games can be used as a tool for training, planning and evaluating emergency pl...

While most of the focus is currently on communities and the health care service sector to have plans and supplies in place for mass victim decontamination, it is just as important for facilities to have proper decontamination (or "decon") procedures in place for emergencies that could occur at their facilities. Written decontamination procedures are required under the Occupational Safety and He...

This paper proposes a Cross Impact Analysis for supporting critical infrastructures risk analysis. This methodology contributes to decision-makers and planners with analytical tools for modeling complex situations. These features are generally useful in emergency management and particularly within the critical infrastructures scope, where complex scenarios for risk analysis and emergency plans ...

The integration and coordination of different emergency service personnel is crucial to Crisis Management. Crisis centers create plans of action to deal with the various situations that arise during an event. These plans require different personnel with different expertise to execute them within a given set of constraints. In this paper, we show that such plans can be represented as workflows, ...

BACKGROUND When an influenza pandemic occurs most of the population is susceptible and attack rates can range as high as 40-50 %. The most important failure in pandemic planning is the lack of standards or guidelines regarding what it means to be 'prepared'. The aim of this study was to assess the preparedness of acute hospitals in the Republic of Ireland for an influenza pandemic from an infec...

INTRODUCTION Recent public health emergencies, such as the 2009 Influenza A/H1N1 Pandemic and Hurricane Katrina, underscore the importance of developing healthcare response plans and protocols for disasters impacting large populations. Significant research and scholarship, including the 2009 Institute of Medicine report on crisis standards of care and the 2008 Task Force for Mass Critical Care ...

BACKGROUND Emergency department-based palliative care services are increasing, but research to develop these services rarely includes input from emergency clinicians, jeopardizing the effectiveness of subsequent palliative care interventions. AIM To collaboratively identify with emergency clinicians' improvement priorities for emergency department-based palliative care for older people. DES...