The major findings of this study suggest that teams often are not competent during the response phase because of education and training deficiencies. Foreign medical teams and medically related nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) do not always provide expected capabilities and services. Failures in leadership and in coordination among teams are also a problem. All deficiencies need to be applied to competency-based curricula.

Disaster response demands a large workforce covering diverse professional sectors. Throughout this article, we illustrate the results of a systematic review of peer-reviewed studies to identify existing competency sets for disaster management and humanitarian assistance that would serve as guidance for the development of a common disaster curriculum. A systematic review of English-language articles was performed on PubMed, Google Scholar, Scopus, ERIC, and Cochrane Library. Studies were included if reporting competency domains, abilities, knowledge, skills, or attitudes for professionals involved disaster relief or humanitarian assistance. Exclusion criteria included abstracts, citations, case studies, and studies not dealing with disasters or humanitarian assistance. Thirty-eight papers were analyzed. Target audience was defined in all articles. Five references (13%) reported cross-sectorial competencies. Most of the articles (81.6%) were specific to health care. Eighteen (47%) papers included competencies for at least 2 different disciplines and 18 (47%) for different professional groups. Nursing was the most widely represented cadre. Eighteen papers (47%) defined competency domains and 36 (94%) reported list of competencies. Nineteen articles (50%) adopted consensus-building to define competencies, and 12 (31%) included competencies adapted to different professional responsibility levels. This systematic review revealed that the largest number of papers were mainly focused on the health care sector and presented a lack of agreement on the terminology used for competency-based definition. (Disaster Med Public Health Preparedness. 2015;9:430-439) Key Words: disaster medicine education, competency-based education, professionalization, humanitarian aid G lobally, 2013 was characterized by 330 natural disasters.1 The poorest countries are typically the most affected, with a total of 5 low-or lower-middle income countries among the top 10 in terms of disaster mortality. Aid workers are often required to operate within disrupted political systems with no pre-existing disaster plans 2 and to perform tasks that fall outside their area of expertise, especially the management of refugees and internally displaced populations, communicable diseases, and the lack of critical resources.3 Lessons learned from relevant disasters-such as Haiti (2010), the Asian tsunami (2004), the Haiyan Typhoon (2013), and the current Ebola virus disease tragedies in West Africacall for attention to the limited capability of foreign medical teams to meet challenges posed by complex emergencies. [4][5][6][7][8][9] These concerns have prompted the international community to devise means for the development of both competence and professionalism within the humanitarian assistance sector. 4,6 Disaster response demands a large workforce with diverse professional disciplines, subspecialty categories, and levels of professional experience and cultural expertise. Regardless of their professional background, education for personnel operating i...

Introduction: Naturally occurring and man-made disasters have been increasing in the world, including Europe, over the past several decades. Health systems are a key part of any community disaster management system. The success of preparedness and prevention depends on the success of activities such as disaster planning, organization and training. The aim of this study is to evaluate health system preparedness for disasters in the 27 European Union member countries. Method: A cross-sectional analysis study was completed between June-September 2012. The checklist used for this survey was a modified from the World Health Organization toolkit for assessing health-system capacity for crisis management. Three specialists from each of the 27 European Union countries were included in the survey. Responses to each survey question were scored and the range of preparedness level was defined as 0-100%, categorized in three levels as follows: Acceptable; Transitional; or Insufficient. Results: Response rate was 79.1%. The average level of disaster management preparedness in the health systems of 27 European Union member states was 68% (Acceptable). The highest level of preparedness was seen in the United Kingdom, Luxemburg, and Lithuania. Considering the elements of disaster management system, the highest level of preparedness score was at health information elements (86%), and the lowest level was for hospitals, and educational elements (54%). Conclusion: This survey study suggests that preparedness level of European Union countries in 2012 is at an acceptable level but could be improved. Elements such as hospitals and education and training suffer from insufficient levels of preparedness. The European Union health systems need a collective strategic plan, as well as enough resources, to establish a comprehensive and standardized disaster management strategy plan. A competency based training curriculum for managers and first responders is basic to accomplishing this goal. Keywords: Disaster medicine; Disaster preparedness; Disaster epidemiology; Health systems; European Union

A more regular and coordinated use of large and routinely collected datasets would benefit post-earthquake epidemiological surveillance. Whenever possible, a cohort design with geographical and temporal comparison groups should be used, and both communicable and non-communicable diseases should be assessed. Post-earthquake epidemiological surveillance should also capture the impact of seismic events on the access to and use of health care services.

Virtual reality simulation proved to be a valuable tool, equivalent to live simulation, to test medical students' abilities to perform mass casualty triage and to detect improvement in such skills.

In the original article, the following name was misspelled: Amir Khorram-Manesh. The publisher regret this oversight.

No abstract

Objective measurement of simulation performance requires a validated and reliable tool. However, no published Italian language assessment tool is available. Translation of a published English language tool, the Ottawa Crisis Resource Management Global Rating Scale (GRS), may lead to a validated and reliable tool. After developing an Italian language translation of the English language tool, the study measured the reliability of the new tool by comparison with the English language tool used independently in the same simulation scenarios. In addition, the validity of the Italian language tool was measured by comparison to a skills score also applied independently. The correlation coefficient between the Italian language overall GRS and the English language overall GRS was 0.82 (adjusted 95 % confidence interval: 0.62-0.92). The correlation coefficient between the Italian language overall GRS and the skill score was 0.85 (adjusted 95 % confidence interval 0.68-0.94). This study demonstrated that the Italian language GRS has acceptable reliability when compared with the English language tool, suggesting that it can be used reliably to evaluate the performance during simulated emergencies. The study also suggests that the tool has acceptable validity for assessing the simulation performance. The study suggests that the Italian language GRS translation has reasonable reliability when compared with the English language GRS and reasonable validity when compared with the assessment of the skills scores. Data suggest that the instrument is adequately reliable for informal and formative type of examinations, but may require further confirmation before use for high-stake examinations such as licensing.