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 ...

Nowadays, a well functioning ICT infrastructure belongs to the most critical factors of companies across all branches of business. An importance of ensuring the continued operation of information systems, or the rapid recovery of the systems in the case of emergency, has increased. These needs require creating business continuity management plan and disaster recovery planning. This paper descri...

Given the personal and societal costs associated with acute impairment and enduring post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), the mental health response to disasters is an integral component of disaster response planning. The purpose of this paper is to explore the compatibility between cognitive-behavioral psychology and the disaster mental health model, and explicate how cognitive-behavioral per...

Unique physiological, developmental, and psychological attributes of children make them one of the more vulnerable populations during mass-casualty incidents. Because of their distinctive vulnerabilities, it is crucial that pediatric needs are incorporated into every stage of disaster planning. Individuals, families, and communities can help mitigate the effects of disasters on pediatric popula...

Hurricanes Katrina and Rita destroyed an entire beloved city and shattered a large part of the US Gulf Coast. Unlike the destruction of 9/11, it is difficult to say at the time of this writing whether or not this region will ever be fully restored. In light of these and other man-made and natural disasters, the world needs to revisit its approach to disaster planning and preparedness to insure ...

Training exercises are now frequently used in health disaster and emergency medicine to train first responders, including the use of 1 tabletops exercises. However, these kinds of drill are barely described in occupational and industrial safety and health. They represent ’ 2 –4 an interesting alternative to real life disaster plans, considering the enormous human and technical resources that ar...

Drawing on the lessons learned from previous disaster and disease outbreak studies over the past two decades, in the following article we review research related to social psychological assessment of community attitudes, knowledge, and beliefs associated with the recent Ebola outbreak and other public health threats, and discuss the use of this information to assist in future disaster planning ...

INTRODUCTION Currently, there is no widely available method to evaluate an emergency department disaster plan. Creation of a standardized patient database and the use of a virtual, live exercise may lead to a standardized and reproducible method that can be used to evaluate a disaster plan. PURPOSE A virtual, live exercise was designed with the primary objective of evaluating a hospital's eme...

Environmental cataclysms will be with mankind even after we have learned to prevent man-made disasters. Prior to Hurricane Katrina, disaster planning, preparedness, and responses were mostly theoretical and based on our preconceived notions of what a disaster should be [1] and were mostly untested, except on relatively small scales. Katrina has changed that in many ways. We knew Katrina was com...

Nowadays, the necessity of accurate quantitative decision support methods is becoming a critical subject for managers as rivalry between organizations caused a more fragile economic environment and brand reputation is becoming more important. Furthermore, dealing with incidents after they happened is not accepted by customers anymore. Managers require powerful decision making tools to support t...