Disaster Management

Disaster will always make us distressful, isn’t it? Fire, typhoon, earthquake, tornado, and flood are examples of it. That is why, it is important for us to know how to manage this disaster. Disaster management is not that easy. The individual, people and entire community must work hand-in-hand to have a successful disaster management.

According to Fred C. Cuny, a humanitarian expert who taught the world how to respond on disaster, the management of emergency cases needs to have four phases. This includes mitigation, preparedness, response and recovery.

Mitigation is the initial phase and it focuses more on eradicating or reducing certain risks. In addition to this, it also involves on long-term measures. It is considered mitigation if it is being applied before the disaster occurred, but if is applied after the disaster occurred, it becomes part of the recovery phase. Physical risk assessment involves in this phase by identifying and evaluating hazards. An example of this is avoiding the place where landslides are commonly occurring.

Personal preparedness is a must in the disaster management phase. It deals with preparing adequate equipments and procedures to be used during disaster. One of the things that one should prepare is the disaster supplies kit. In this kit, one must have a three-day supply of water. Moreover, first aid materials such as sterile bandages, anti-septic solutions and topical antibiotics should be included too.

After the occurrence of the disaster, the response phase comes in. This phase provides emergency services such as an ambulance. One should sort out patients well in this phase. Triage is used in sorting patients with regards to their needs when there are no adequate resources available. It is important for us to have knowledge on triage.
There are two types of triage, and these are the simple triage and the advanced triage. Simple triage sorts out severe patients from the less severe one. This type of triage assesses on who are the priority patients that need to be transported first. However, in advanced triage, the doctors may decide who are not to receive treatment due to their little chance of survival. Advanced care is provided to patients with greater chance of survival to save scarce resources from patients with little chance of survival. Triage tags are used in categorizing patients according to their level of injury.

In simple triage, it is divided into four groups. The deceased, immediate or priority one, delayed or priority two and the minor or the priority three. A person is being triaged as deceased when he or she is not breathing anymore. Along with the three groups of triage, the immediate triage is the first priority and the tag color used is red. The people who belong here are in critical condition and must be transported fast by an ambulance for immediate treatment. The yellow tag or the delayed triage becomes the second priority. They can be transported after the patients of the immediate triage. They have a stable condition but still needs medical assistance. Lastly, the people with minor conditions have green tags. These people can walk, may only require little treatment. They are being transported after the immediate and minor triage.

There are 5 kinds of advanced triage. These are the expectant, immediate, observation, wait and dismiss. People with severe injuries that will die hours or days after belong to the expectant triage, and a black tag is being used. The immediate triage uses red tag. People who require surgery are the first priority on this kind of triage. On the other hand, people in the observation triage need to be re-triage frequently and they need hospital care. The yellow tag is used here. The walking wounded people belong to the wait triage and they have green tags. They don’t require immediate doctor’s care and can be advised to go home and be back for check up the next day. An example is a person with a broken bone. The white tag is for the people on the dismiss triage. These are the people who don’t require doctor’s care. The first aid provided here is already sufficient.

The last phase in disaster management is the recovery phase. This phase is more on rebuilding the destroyed property and it is far different from the other phases.

References:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disaster_management

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triage