Futures practices have always sought to bridge longer term, context uncertainty and today's actions. Despite the emergence of diverse foresight lineages, methods and tools, the differences between 'better proactive foresight' and 'better reactive preparedness' remain unclear. This paper focuses on the 2007-2010 financial crisis in order to clarify misconceptions and confusions concerning 'scena...

Lead contamination in the drinking water of a US Rust Belt city seems to have little in common with a mosquito-borne viral outbreak creating global infectious disease concern. However, the water crisis in Flint, Michigan, has important similarities to the Zika virus in South America, relevant to the field of disaster medicine and public health preparedness. As we face emerging infectious diseas...

Sustainable approaches to crises, especially non-trauma-related public health emergencies, are severely lacking. At present, the Ebola crisis is defining the operational public health skill sets for infectious disease epidemics that are not widely known or appreciated. Indigenous and foreign medical teams will need to adapt to build competency-based curriculum and standards of care for the futu...

Events such as the 2014-2015 West Africa epidemic of Ebola virus disease highlight the importance of the capacity to detect and respond to public health threats. We describe capacity-building efforts during and after the Ebola epidemic in Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Guinea and public health progress that was made as a result of the Ebola response in 4 key areas: emergency response, laboratory ca...

Timely and accurate processing of crisis information and effective communication have been documented as critical elements of disaster relief operations. Despite the lessons learned from previous crises, preparing information for humanitarian assistance and ineffective information sharing remain a recurring and almost impossible task for relief agencies. The purpose of this paper is to propose ...

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...

background local health departments (lhds) operate in a complex and dynamic public health landscape, with changing demands on their emergency response capacities. informatics capacities might play an instrumental role in aiding lhds emergency preparedness. this study aimed to explore the extent to which lhds’ informatics capacities are associated with their activity level in emergency preparedn...