PUBLIC HEALTH EMERGENCIES UNDERSCORE THE IMMEdiate and crucial need to plan for a mass disaster in which tens or even hundreds of thousands of individuals suddenly require medical care. On October 24, 2009, President Obama declared a public health emergency in response to influenza A(H1N1), but natural disasters (eg, hurricanes, floods, or earthquakes) and terrorism acts (eg, anthrax or a nucle...

Hospitals and health facilities play a crucial role in providing health services for their communities, in particular during crises and emergencies. Well prepared and disaster resilient hospitals are therefore essential to be able to meet the increased demands for life saving services in large scale emergencies, which can quickly overwhelm the surge capacity and functional safety of the hospita...

Developed by the Center for Disease Control and Prevention in 2002, the Crisis Emergency and Risk Communication (CERC) training module is a nationally and internationally recognized communication model. With the looming threat of a pandemic and the potential for a protracted ongoing siege, a valuable opportunity exists to introduce crisis and emergency preparedness communication best practices ...

Hospitals are a symbol of social welfare and the last refuge of patients, which is the most important issue of the health system. Patient safety is the first and most important issue for the health system.  Before COVID-19, the World Health Organization (WHO) defined the Hospital Safety Index (HSI) to measure hospital preparedness for disasters. During the COVID-19 crisis, hospitals faced many ...

This paper aims at clarifying a timely topic of how communication strategy choices are made in evolving, complex crises, such as those caused by terrorism involving chemical, biological, radiological, or nuclear (CBRN) agents. This is done by examining data gathered from a table-top discussion among crisis communication experts, focusing on a scenario of an anthrax attack and analysed qualitati...

conclusions overall, the results derived from these studies indicated that hospital safety levels in most of the surveyed hospitals were moderate. although the situation in hospitals is not critical, there is a need to plan and take appropriate measures to improve the safety level of the hospitals. results hospital preparedness in disaster was evaluated in three dimensions: structural, non-stru...