BACKGROUND Recent occurrences of disaster events highlight the need for increased attention to improving students' knowledge of disaster readiness. Nursing education continues to struggle with the delivery of consistent, effective, and impactful teaching methods for disaster response. This study aimed to explore the effectiveness of using a simulated mass casualty incident (MCI) and Web-based r...

Disaster mitigation and management is one of the most challenging examples of decision making under uncertain, missing, and sketchy, information. Even in the extreme cases where the nature of the disaster is known, preparedness plans are in place, and analysis, evaluation, and simulations of the disaster management procedures have been performed, the amount and magnitude of “surprises” that acc...

The paper analyzes relevant concepts for command & control effectiveness in the German disaster response system. The concepts are derived from legal text review, an analogy between military and disaster response domain and interpretations of representatives from major German disaster response organizations. The concepts are integrated into a conceptual model.

About the lead author (Dr Weiner): I am a pediatric emergency medicine physician at Children’s Hospital Boston (CHB)/Harvard Medical School (HMS) and the CHB representative and a chartermember of the HMS Section on Disaster Medicine. I have been a National Disaster Medical Systemmember on the Disaster Medical Assistance Team, the International Medical Surgical Response Team, and the Pediatric S...

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...

When planning and modeling disaster response processes (DRP), the unpredictability of disasters precludes accounting for all eventualities in advance. DRPs are thus typically concretized and adapted after the disaster and during the process’s run-time. Since time is critical and uncertainty typical, planning of DRPs requires methods and tools that support disaster managers in process analysis, ...

OBJECTIVE Children account for 30 percent of the US population; as a result, many victims of disaster events are children. The most critically injured pediatric victims would be best cared for in a tertiary care pediatric hospital. The Children's Hospital Association (CHA) undertook a survey of its members to determine their level of readiness to respond to a mass casualty disaster. DESIGN Th...