Components of a Disaster Response System

Abstract

The intent of this chapter is to describe the general framework of emergency public health and emergency medical services operations in disaster events in order to inform the planning and conduct of the evaluation study. The objective of disaster medical and public health response operations is to deliver immediate health care relief to an affected population until ‘pre-event’ health services can be restored. The functions of the health sector described in this chapter are termed basic societal/support functions or emergency support functions. Each function carries with it a series of activities or interventions; therefore, it seems reasonable to identify and study these activities from the perspective of the user rather than from an event-specific viewpoint. It is important to note that the outcomes or level of performance of these activities be assessed both quantitatively and qualitatively within the context of the larger evaluation study. More importantly, the data collected through systematic evaluation in these cases should be uniformly reported so as to make them generalizable to similar hazard events, thereby facilitating the creation of an ‘all-hazards’ repository of information on disasters. In this chapter we describe a generalized disaster response framework, including a ‘concept of operations’, for the public health and medical components of a disaster response system.