Question

Disaster Plans

The SNS is a pivotal tool in the event of a disaster.

·      List and explain the types of items a community hospital will require and seek from the SNS in the event of a disaster.

·      List and explain at least two concerns you may have when forced to rely on this facility.

·      During the creation of disaster plans, it is common and essential that neighboring hospitals work together. List and explain some of the problems that may arise from a disaster plan, which may be ten years old and involved all of the local community hospitals at the time it was originally designed.

Make sure that you include an introduction and conclusion to your post.

Answer 1

An outbreak of disaster impacts the life and resources of many communities. These disaster many be internal or external, may be informed or uninformed. Whatever may be the situation, a disaster is an emergency situation which lays intense burden on health system. For some disaster like hurricane, flood and volcanoes- the hospital receives warning and are able to activate their disaster plan before the event.But some disaster like earthquake, tsunami, there is no advance warning. Hospital are the first institutions which is affected by the incident of a disaster.In order to prepare a hospital to handle such massive casaulities of disaster, every hospital should have a disaster plan which requires internal as well as community planning. It is important that during disaster limited resources are utilized in an effective way to save as many lives as possible.

1) The use of social network services (SNS) like facebook twitter has a pivotal role to play during disaster management. At the event of disaster, the preparedness of the institution to face the damages resulting from the event is very important. The most significant item that a community hospital can seek from the SNS is

• Training and knowledge: Adequate information about the disaster, its nature and ways to combat its effect is available in social media. It educates us about the previous disaster and its management measures.
• Planning: A good disaster management plan is crucial. The information regarding the various disaster plans and the outcome of the implementation of those plans will help the hospital develop and implement a proper disaster plan with available resources.
• Means of communication: During disaster almost all other methods of communication is lost. Social networks helps to establish global relationships.
• Emergency warnings: The social networks are used widely nowadays to generate alerts on massive scale to alarm community about the upcoming disaster.
• Helps to generate volunteers and donor to help during disaster management.
• Connect the family and friends.
• Provides information about the unclaimed propertities, dead bodies.
• Helps to coordinate relief efforts with other agencies.
• Situational updates : gives awareness about the present scenario after the disaster and measure taken to manage disaster.

2) The major two concerns while relying on use of social network is the validity of information and effectiveness of the interventions. It has been experienced that all the information available on the social network site is not reliable. Sometimes, the information is from a past event or may be wrong information. The other concern is about the use of intervention based on the information received from social networks. During disaster, there is hardly any time to make trials. The effectiveness of any plan as per the social network cannot be evaluated. Its a hit and trial method.

3) During creating a disaster plan, it is common and essential that the neighbouring hospitals work together. Not all the hospital possess adequate resources to accomodate the casualities of a disaster. Therefore in a locality of disaster, certain hospitals are alarming to activate their disaster management plan. The other hospital with limited resources are adviced to be prepared to receive casuality if the major hospital runs out of manpower and resources. One of the major issue that was found in such scenario is the miscommunication among the people within the hospital management and those engaged in the disaster site. Often the casualities are brought accidently to those instutitions who were secondarily advised to stay prepared to receive casuality. This resulted in loss of lives due to lack of manpower and resources.

The other problem that was found is improper disaster management plan. Framing a good disaster plan in a hospital is crucial during disaster management. An adequate training and knowledge is needed to develop an effective disaster plan. It has also seen that the in some situations the neighbouring hospitals are not cooperate to participate in the disaster management.

To conclude, although a natural disaster is unpredictable and causes severe damage in community, its intensity of damage can be reduced with an adequate use of SNS, adequate alert system, good disaster plan in hospitals and with good collaborative efforts of the various groups in the community.

" We can learn from every disaster. Whether its a fire or flood, we learn something from it. So we can respond to next one better."

- Malcolm Turnbull