On October 29, 2012, Hurricane Sandy made landfall in the neighborhood of Red Hook in Brooklyn, New York. The massive tidal surge generated by the storm submerged the coastal area, home to a population over 11,000 individuals, including the largest public housing development in Brooklyn. The infrastructure devastation was profound: the storm rendered electricity, heat, water, Internet, and phone services inoperative, whereas local ambulatory medical services including clinics, pharmacies, home health agencies, and other resources were damaged beyond functionality. Lacking these services or lines of communication, medically fragile individuals became isolated from the hospital and 911-emergency systems without a preexisting mechanism to identify or treat them. Medically fragile individuals primarily included those with chronic medical conditions dependent on frequent and consistent monitoring and treatments. In response, the Red Hook community established an ad hoc volunteer medical relief effort in the wake of the storm, filling a major gap that continues to exist in disaster medicine for low-income urban environments. Here we describe this effort, including an analysis of the medically vulnerable in this community, and recommend disaster risk reduction strategies and resilience measures for future disaster events. (Disaster Med Public Health Preparedness. 2015;9:354–358)

The current Ebola outbreak is the worst global public health emergency of our generation, and our global health care community must and will rise to serve those affected. Aid organizations participating in the Ebola response must carefully plan to carry out their responsibility to ensure the health, safety, and security of their responders. At the same time, individual health care workers and their employers must evaluate the ability of an aid organization to protect its workers in the complex environment of this unheralded Ebola outbreak. We present a minimum set of operational standards developed by a consortium of Boston-based hospitals that a professional organization should have in place to ensure the health, safety, and security of its staff in response to the Ebola virus disease outbreak. (Disaster Med Public Health Preparedness. 2014;0:1-2)

On January 12, 2010, a major earthquake in Haiti resulted in approximately 212 000 deaths, 300 000 injuries, and more than 1.2 million internally displaced people, making it the most devastating disaster in Haiti's recorded history. Six academic medical centers from the city of Chicago established an interinstitutional collaborative initiative, the Chicago Medical Response, in partnership with nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) in Haiti that provided a sustainable response, sending medical teams to Haiti on a weekly basis for several months. More than 475 medical volunteers were identified, of whom 158 were deployed to Haiti by April 1, 2010. This article presents the shared experiences, observations, and lessons learned by all of the participating institutions. Specifically, it describes the factors that provided the framework for the collaborative initiative, the communication networks that contributed to the ongoing response, the operational aspects of deploying successive medical teams, and the benefits to the institutions as well as to the NGOs and Haitian medical system, along with the challenges facing those institutions individually and collectively. Academic medical institutions can provide a major reservoir of highly qualified volunteer medical personnel that complement the needs of NGOs in disasters for a sustainable medical response. Support of such collaborative initiatives is required to ensure generalizability and sustainability.

(Disaster Med Public Health Preparedness. 2010;4:169-173)

In crisis situations, there is an enormous burden of disease and very limited resources. To achieve the best possible health outcomes in these situations and ensure that scarce resources are not wasted, knowledge from health research needs to be translated into practice. We investigated what information from health research was needed by humanitarian aid workers in crisis settings and how it could be best provided. Semistructured interviews were conducted by telephone with 19 humanitarian aid workers from a range of organizations around the world and the results analyzed thematically. Participants identified a clear and currently unmet need for access to high-quality health research to support evidence-based practice in crisis situations. They emphasized that research into delivery of health care was potentially more valuable than research into the effectiveness of particular clinical interventions and highlighted the importance of including contextual information to enable the relevance of the research to be assessed. They suggested that providers of health research information and humanitarian aid organizations work together to develop these resources.

(Disaster Med Public Health Preparedness. 2011;5:69-72)

Objective: To describe a population-based, multifaceted shared-care intervention for late-life depression in residential care as a new model of geriatric practice, to outline its development and implementation, and to describe the lessons learned during the implementation process. Setting: A large continuing-care retirement community in Sydney, Australia, providing three levels of care (independent living units, assisted-living complexes, and nursing homes). Participants:) The intervention was implemented for the entire non-nursing home population (residents in independent and assisted living: N = 1,466) of the facility and their health care providers. Of the 1,036 residents who were eligible and agreed to be interviewed, 281 (27.1%) were classified as depressed according to the Geriatric Depression Scale. Intervention Description: The intervention included: (a) multidisciplinary collaboration between primary care physicians, facility health care providers, and the local psychogeriatric service; (b) trainning for primary care physicians and other facility health care providers about detecting and managing depression; and (c) depression-related health education/promotion programs for residents. Conclusions: The intervention was widely accepted by residents and their health care providers, and was sustained and enhanced by the facility after the completion of the study. It is possible to implement and sustain a multifaceted shared-care intervention for late-life depression in a residential care facility where local psychogeriatric services are scarce, staff-to-resident ratios are low, and the needs of depressed to residents are substantial.