International Disaster Health Care

This title includes a number of Open Access chapters.

International Disaster Health Care: Preparedness, Response, Resource Management, and Education provides a complete image of the needs, concerns, and insights that relate to disaster preparedness from an international health-care perspective.

The United Nations has recognized the devastating consequences of "unpredictable, unpreventable and impersonal" disasters—at least US $2 trillion in economic damage and more than 1.3 million lives lost from natural disasters in the last two decades alone. In many disasters (both natural and man-made) hundreds—and in major earthquakes, thousands—of lives are lost in the first days following the event because of the lack of medical/surgical facilities to treat those with potentially survivable injuries. Disasters disrupt and destroy not only medical facilities in the disaster zone but also infrastructure (roads, airports, electricity) and potentially local healthcare personnel as well. To minimize morbidity and mortality from disasters, medical treatment must begin immediately, within minutes ideally, but certainly within 24 hours (not the days to weeks currently seen in medical response to disasters).

Edited by emergency health professionals, this valuable compendium is broken into five sections, which describe the following topics:

• disaster-related health care
• disaster preparedness and resilience
• effective medical responses to disasters
• managing resources during disasters
• how medical staff can be better educated to handle disasters

This volume brings together a wealth of information that will be valuable to disaster management professionals and others responsible for providing emergency services.