Should New South Wales Hospital Disaster Teams Be Sent to Major Incident Sites?

Abstract

Hospital medical teams suffer from the same problems of inadequate training, experience and personal safety equipment that are identified in previous reports from disasters overseas. The continued focus on hospital medical teams in counter-disaster planning as the primary source of on-site medical services is inappropriate because, with the exception of retrieval doctors who routinely provide pre-hospital trauma care, appropriately trained and experienced doctors are unlikely to be available from within the hospital system.

“Operation South East Asia Tsunami Assist”: an Australian team in the Maldives

“…While the Australian Defence Force had prime responsibility for deploying medical teams into areas affected by both the 1998 Aitape (Papua New Guinea) tsunami and 2002 Bali bombing, 3 , 4 Australia has not often deployed civilian medical teams into disaster areas. Most states and territories base their internal disaster relief medical teams around major hospitals; this is a practice which has been questioned since the 1997 Thredbo disaster 5 . However, as the Western Australian State Health Coordinator in times of disaster, I knew we could put a medical team together at short notice.…”

Education and Training of Australian Disaster Medical Assistance Team Members: Results of a National Survey

“…It is not just a question of magnitude, with an increase in patient numbers, but also a different type of patient and a system under extreme stress 19 . Standard medical and nursing training is unlikely to prepare hospital or community staff adequately for work in complex emergencies or disasters 20, 21 . Similarly, the military acknowledge that it is unacceptable to send units trained for combat, and hope they quickly adjust to emergency relief practices.…”

“…19 Standard medical and nursing training is unlikely to prepare hospital or community staff adequately for work in complex emergencies or disasters. 20,21 Similarly, the military acknowledge that it is unacceptable to send units trained for combat, and hope they quickly adjust to emergency relief practices. These staff, including medical, find they do not have the training necessary for providing humanitarian assistance.…”

Family therapists in trauma‐response teams: bringing systems thinking into interdisciplinary fieldwork

“…Mental health workers representing a variety of disciplinary backgrounds and training are coordinating their efforts now more than ever before with medical providers and other team members in responding to local, large-scale, natural and man-made disasters. The acute nature of this work -its fast pace and intensity, chaotic and unpredictable structure, clinical content, and simultaneous involvement of professionals and non-professionals -expands providers' roles beyond that of conventional office-based clinical practices (Bacigalupe, 2002;Garner and Nocera, 1999;Mendenhall, 2006;Mitchell and Everly, 2003). Whether a psychologist, family therapist, social worker, counsellor or psychiatrist, fieldwork can push mental health providers outside of their respective disciplinary comfort zones into comparatively uncharted ways of working that extend not only to the surviving victims and families who allow us access to their most raw and painful suffering, but also to the ways in which we attend to our own psychological and physical well-being, interpersonal and interprofessional boundaries, cross-disciplinary tensions, and team structure and hierarchies (Fraenkel, 2002;Reilly, 2002;Walsh, 2007).…”