Disasters and the disaster medicine

ABSTRACT

The definition of a disaster varies across research institutions, although it is generally regarded as a sudden event that demands more resources than the community can offer. Disaster medicine originates from military medicine. It is a new field of medicine that has much in common with emergency medicine, but focuses more on disaster management, targeting populations. It plays a key role both in the pre-event period by helping with disaster preparedness and in the event of a disaster by providing disaster medical services, including on-scene emergency life-saving interventions, thereby contributing to a decrease in the preventable mortality rate. Triage is a system used to sort mass disaster victims according to severity, enabling resources to be allocated, distributed, and utilized more efficiently. During disasters, a hospital should respond to the surge in patients in accordance with the standards and principles of disaster medicine by activating its emergency operation plan, converting the usual medical system into the emergency system, and putting disaster response teams into operation. Disaster medicine is the key discipline for all aspects of preparedness and response to conventional disasters, and even to chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear, and explosive events.