EMERGENCY SERVICES
‘adequately’. Because history teaches that no matter what, we are never ‘adequately’ equipped or prepared to deal with ‘all-hazards’ - either physical or man-made. On the other hand this is not an excuse not to be prepared at all! The medical community is and will always
W
be the fi rst to be involved in catastrophes of any kind. In all First Aid courses, we teach that we do not care about what the causative agents are but we focus on managing the results of their adverse eff ect on humans. This might be true for regular incidents like car accidents or fl ood victims or shootings. In other words, this works OK with conventional emergencies in an urban environment. The emergency management cycle is
composed by four elements: mitigation (enhances prevention, minimise impact and risk), preparedness (planning component), response (most complex part of the cycle aiming at limiting injuries, loss of life and damage to property), and recovery. According to Nelson et al. (Assessing Public Health Emergency Preparedness: Concepts, Tools, and Challenges, Annual Review of Public Health, 2007): public health emergencies “are defi ned as much by their health consequences by their causes and precipitating eff ects. A situation becomes emergent when its health consequences have the potential to overwhelm routine community capabilities to address them. Thus, the proposed defi nition focuses on situations ‘whose scale, timing or unpredictability threatens to overwhelm routine capabilities.’ The defi nition is also aligned with the all-hazards approach to preparedness instead of focusing on a ‘disaster du jour’…”
hen fi rst asked to submit a paper on this topic my fi rst thought was that a word was missing from the title:
CHEMICAL, BIOLOGICAL & NUCLEAR WARFARE | 2012/02 | 47
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