OBJECTIVE Over the last century, the number of disasters has increased. Many governments and scientific institutions agree that disaster medicine education should be included in the standard medical curriculum. Italian medical students' perceptions of mass casualty incidents and disasters and whether-and if so to what extent-such topics are part of their academic program were investigated. DE...

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...

Erik Noji, mentioned, tongue in cheek, Noah as the first disaster manager during a lecture in 2005. The canonical description of "The Genesis Flood" does describe Noah as a master planner and executer of an evacuation of biblical proportions. After gaining knowledge of a potential catastrophic disaster he planned and executed an evacuation to mitigate the effects of the "Genesis Flood" by build...

When disasters strike, local physicians are at the front lines of the response in their community. Curriculum guidelines have been developed to aid in preparation of family medicine residents to fulfill this role. Disaster responsiveness has recently been added to the Residency Review Committee Program Requirements in Community Medicine with little family medicine literature support. In this ar...

1Renal Disaster Relief Task Force (RDRTF) for Turkey, 2RDRTF of the International Society of Nephrology (ISN), 3Department of Internal Medicine/Nephrology, Istanbul School of Medicine, Istanbul, Turkey, 4Renal Disaster Relief Task Force European Branch, Department of Internal Medicine/Nephrology, University Hospital, Ghent, Belgium and 5Renal Division, Department of Internal Medicine, Universit...

BACKGROUND Disaster medicine education is an enormous challenge, but indispensable for disaster preparedness. AIMS We aimed to develop and implement a disaster medicine curriculum for medical student education that can serve as a peer-reviewed, structured educational guide and resource. Additionally, the process of designing, approving and implementing such a curriculum is presented. METHOD...

INTRODUCTION In stressful situations such as the management of major incidents and disasters, the ability to work in a structured way is important. Medical management groups initially are formed by personnel from different operations that are on-call when the incident or disaster occurs. OBJECTIVE The aim of this study was to test if performance indicators for staff procedure skills in medica...

This special issue of Disaster Medicine and Public Health Preparedness is being published as a result of the tragic events that occurred on the Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University (Virginia Tech) campus in April 2007. Such events vividly underscore the need for specialized training to ensure the most appropriate and effective response on the part of the medical and public health...

BACKGROUND Although disaster simulation trainings were widely used to test hospital disaster plans and train medical staff, the teaching performance of the instructors in disaster medicine training has never been evaluated. The aim of this study was to determine whether the performance indicators for measuring educational skill in disaster medicine training could indicate issues that needed imp...

Is there a need for scientific support for disaster health and medicine? It seems that there is an accepted disaster health and medicine knowledge base that is based largely on opinions of those who have deemed themselves expert in disaster health, or based on descriptive experiences of some during disaster deployments. While opinion and experience may be methods for determining standards for h...