Publication Findings
Assessment of the reliability of the Johns Hopkins/Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality hospital disaster drill evaluation tool.

We found a high degree of internal reliability in the AHRQ instrument’s items, suggesting the underlying construct of hospital preparedness is valid.

Atmospheric dispersion and impact modeling systems: How are they perceived as support tools for nuclear crises management?

ADIAM cartographic results have the potential to reinforce the construction of a share understanding between experts and decision makers of the radiological situation leading to a more efficient management of emergency and crisis situations.

Barriers to implementing infection prevention and control guidelines during crises: Experiences of health care professionals.

To improve adherence to crisis guidelines, the generic barriers should be addressed when developing guidelines, irrespective of the infectious agent.Crisis guidelines were found to have 4 generic barriers to adherence: (1) lack of imperative or precise wording, (2) lack ofeasily identifiable instructions specific to each profession, (3) lack of concrete performance targets, and (4) lack of timely andadequate guidance on personal protective equipment and other safety measures.

Building Capacity for Community Disaster Preparedness: A Call for Collaboration Between Public Environmental Health and Emergency Preparedness and Response Programs. (Cover story)

The results indicate that key informants were highly confident in their workforces’ efficacy, ability, willingness, and motivation to directly engage local communities in Environmental Health Emergency Preparedness.

Building health care system capacity to respond to disasters: successes and challenges of disaster preparedness health care coalitions.

The commonly noted benefits of HCCs were: community-wide and regional partnership buildingproviding an impartial forum for capacity buildingsharing of education and training opportunitiesstaff- and resource-sharingincentivizing the participation of clinical partners in preparedness activitiesbetter communication with the publicability to surge.Challenges are:stakeholder engagement, staffing, funding, rural needs, cross-border partnerships, education and training,grant requirements

Burn Disaster Response Planning in New York City: Updated Recommendations for Best Practices.

Existing burn center referral guidelines were modified into a hierarchical BDRH matrix, which would vector certain patients to local or regional burn centers for initial care until capacity is reached.

Challenges in coordination: differences in perception of civil and military organizations by comparing international scientific literature and field experiences.

The primary research question addressed in this study – the extent of scientific studies in challenges to civil–military coordination – was answered by identifying specific challenges in civil–military coordination through a systematic literature review and categorizing these challenges under major themes.National backgrounds, attitudes and perceptions of the professionals towards the other organization were found to be key factors influencing civil–military coordination. This indicates that comparisons between the perceptions of professionals from both civil and military teams with different nationalities and different political histories should be carried out in future research.

Community Assessment for Public Health Emergency Response (CASPER): An Innovative Emergency Management Tool in the United States.

During the study period, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention conducted 24 domestic in-person CASPER trainings for over 1000 staff in 38 states of the US. On average, there was a marked increase in knowledge of CASPER. 99 CASPERs were conducted in the US, 53.5% of which assessed preparedness; the others were categorized as response or recovery (27.2%) or were unrelated to a disaster (19.2%)

Comparing four operational SAR-based water and flood detection approaches.

In general, the performance of the four approaches is very satisfying: out of the 20 water masks 17 reach OAs of >90% and 11 OAs of >95%. Also, both the UAs and the PAs give reasonable results for nearly all approaches, with most values clearly above 85.0%The four approaches give similar classification results of the PAs, UAs, and OAs in areas where open water surfaces are relatively smooth and the occurrence of water look alike areas is low, i.e. in the test areas of Vietnam and China. In areas of low contrast between open water surfaces and the surrounding non-water areas, the classification result strongly depends on the selected threshold value. In the test area of Mali, many sand-covered areas exist that exhibit backscatter levels nearly as low as water areasIn cases of occurring water look alike areas, TFS and RaMaFlood, which both use auxiliary data derived from digital elevation models, lead to the best classification results.

Computer-based collaborative training for transportation security and emergency response

Collaborative training has the ability to improve the communication within the organization by better identifying with whom to communicate, the most appropriate resources and methods to secure effective communication, best actions to be followed and the procedures and plans to follow in order to mitigate emergency eventsThe drill results indicate that the computer-based, collaborative training tool developed is an economical and powerful training tool to enhance employees capabilities and preparedness to respond to emergencies.

eu Portfolio of Solutions web site has been initially developed in the scope of DRIVER+ project. Today, the service is managed by AIT Austrian Institute of Technology GmbH., for the benefit of the European Crisis Management. PoS is endorsed and supported by the Disaster Competence Network Austria (DCNA) as well as by the STAMINA and TeamAware H2020 projects.