BACKGROUND Disasters may lead to ethical challenges that are different from usual medical practices. In addition, disaster situations are related with public health ethics more than medical ethics, and accordingly may require stronger effort to achieve a balance between individual and collective rights. This paper aims to review some ethical dilemmas that arise in disasters and mainly focuses o...

OBJECTIVES Disaster health workers currently have no common standard based on a shared set of competencies, learning objectives, and performance metrics with which to develop courses or training materials relevant to their learning audience. We examined how existing competency sets correlate within the 2012 pyramidal learning framework of competency sets in disaster medicine and public health c...

Disaster management utilizes diverse technologies to accomplish a complex set of tasks. Despite a decade of experience, few published reports have reviewed application of telemedicine (clinical care at a distance enabled by telecommunication) in disaster situations. Appropriate new telemedicine applications can improve future disaster medicine outcomes, based on lessons learned from a decade of...

UNLABELLED The 13th World Congress on Disaster and Emergency Medicine, convened in Melbourne, Australia in May 2003, requested the World Association for Disaster and Emergency Medicine (WADEM) to lead the development of "International Standards and Guidelines on Education and Training for "Disaster Medicine". This Paper has been developed by a Working Group of the WADEM Education Committee ("th...

INTRODUCTION Historically, medical students have been deployed to care for disaster victims but may not have been properly educated to do so. A previous evaluation of senior civilian medical students in Belgium revealed that they are woefully unprepared. Based on the nature of their military training, we hypothesised that military medical students were better educated and prepared than their ci...

Veterinarians in the United States of America and Canada are involved in a variety of activities which contribute to improving human health and well-being. Some of these activities can be considered as a part of veterinary public health (VPH), including: zoonoses control, food safety, environmental protection, comparative medicine, disaster medicine and animal welfare. Both countries have feder...

Healthcare infrastructure and medical schools in Syria have been greatly compromised by military conflict and humanitarian disaster. Medical students and healthcare professionals reached out for remote learning opportunities. Surprisingly, they desired a curriculum in evidence-based medicine. We report on a curriculum that was delivered to 126 learners using an online remote delivery platform. ...

About one year prior to the earthquake, the JMA’s Committee on Emergency and Disaster Medicine proposed that Japan Medical Association Team (JMAT) be formed and issued a press release to that effect. The JMA decided to form JMAT on March 15, 2011, in response to the earthquake, and requested that prefectural medical associations nationwide send JMAT to the affected areas as emergency medical re...

My planned editorial for this issue was to continue recounting the progress the Society of Disaster Medicine and Public Health has made toward achieving our original 2010 goals. Although this discussion is critically important in helping to define a discipline of disaster medicine and public health that is both professional and crossdisciplinary, that follow-up editorial is being deferred to th...