have undertaken the task of making our communities healthy places in which to live. In addition there is a plenum of information which will help the person in attending to his own personal health and that of his family, including a chapter on first aid and another on maternal care. A general knowledge of common disease characteristics will help the student to recognize these conditions and take...

The concept of "psychiatric first aid" or early treatment psychiatry is not new. Such services have existed, in some measure, in various medical settings: general hospitals, private psychiatric practice, and psychiatric receiving hospitals. What is relatively new, however, is the idea of developing a service program with early treatment or immediate care as its central focus; in other words, to...

BACKGROUND Psychological reactions to terror attacks have been documented as ranging from no symptoms to transient behavioural symptoms to more serious posttraumatic stress. SOURCES OF DATA A review of representative studies is presented, with a critical analysis of the salient points of the various psychological intervention strategies for terrorist attacks. AREAS OF AGREEMENT Common aspec...

The Targeted Agenda Program (TAP) has been introduced for the first time during the 15th World Congress on Disaster and Emergency Medicine (15WCDEM) in Amsterdam in 2007 to stimulate interaction between the participants before, during and after the congress. A TAP process consists of 11 steps, starting with defining a relevant issue and ending with the publication of a TAP report based on exper...

The sudden onset of war results in considerable psychological challenges as well as physical danger for populations under attack. While all civilian-directed violence carries common elements of fear and threat, unexpected consequences of war often require coping strategies to be adaptive, flexible, and effective. The Hezbollah-Israel confrontation of 2006 created such unanticipated consequences...

Non-fatal injuries have a significant impact on disability, productivity, and economic cost, and first-aid can play an important role in improving non-fatal injury outcomes. Data collected from a census conducted as part of a drowning prevention project in Bangladesh was used to quantify the impact of first-aid provided by trained and untrained providers on non-fatal injuries. The census covere...

BACKGROUND Emergency medical communication centres (EMCCs) dispatch and allocate ambulance resources, and provide first-aid guidance to on-scene bystanders. We aimed to 1) evaluate whether dispatcher guidance improved bystander first aid in trauma, and 2) to evaluate whether dispatchers and on-scene emergency medical services (EMS) crews identified the same first aid measures as indicated. ME...

ay ii. ountnp, B.JJ. With foreword by H. Crichton-Miller, F.R.C.P. Independent Press Ltd. 8s. 6d. It is difficult to do justice to this book in a short space. Its very existence calls attention to subjects on which medical opinion is still sharply divided, that is the amount that ministers and social workers should leave and apply psychology in their everyday work. Mr. Guntrip devotes the first...

For major physical diseases, it is widely accepted that members of the public will benefit by knowing what actions they can take for prevention, early intervention, and treatment. However, this type of public knowledge about mental disorders (mental health literacy) has received much less attention. There is evidence from surveys in several countries for deficiencies in (a) the public's knowled...