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INTRODUCTION: Effective crisis management can reduce the costs and consequences of a crisis and has a significant impact on saving human lives in critical situations. Proper use of information and communication technologies (ICTs) can improve all crisis management phases and crisis communication cycles according to the needs of stakeholders. The purpose of this review article is to identify which ICTs have been used in effective crisis management and what managerial tasks they support. METHOD: A systematic review was conducted based on PRISMA protocol. The investigated articles that have been published in English were all indexed in PubMed, Science Direct, IEEE, Web of Science, and Google Scholar databases from 2005 to 2019. The keywords searched were "Crisis Management," "Emergency Management," "Information and Communication Technology," and their synonyms. RESULTS: A total of 1,703 articles were retrieved, and 81 articles that met the inclusion criteria were retained. In terms of content, there were 54 case studies/review articles, 38 proposals, and seven prototypes among which 18 case studies and proposals were the same. According to surveys, 18 ICT tools and technologies have been used in effective crisis management with the purpose of supporting managerial tasks such as situation assessment, decision-making, coordination/command and control, communication with the public, and supply of basic services in order to enable crisis management and logistics. CONCLUSION: This study showed that proper use of ICT can help crisis managers optimize their performance that will consequently result in effective crisis management and the reduction of casualties. In the crisis management cycle, several tools and technologies have been used for various purposes, however; some crisis managers' tasks were still not taken into consideration sufficiently, and thus, some recommendations for further research in this field were provided.
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Comunicação , HumanosRESUMO
PURPOSE: As central nervous system (CNS) tumors account for second most common childhood malignancies and the first cause of mortality in children with cancer, improving treatment modalities can lead to increase the health care of patients. In this study, we examined the prevalence of childhood brain tumors in patients who referred to MAHAK's Pediatric Cancer Treatment and Research Center (MPCTRC) for treatment. METHODS: A retrospective review of all children less than 15 years old with a CNS histologically proven tumor, who presented to MPCTRC from April 2007 to April 2010, was performed. Data was analyzed by SPSS version 19 with Kolmogorov-Smirnov and Chi-square tests. RESULTS: There were 198 (124 boys) children eligible for the study. The majority of the tumors were infratentorial (n = 134), and the rest were supratentorial (n = 60) and spinal (n = 4) cases. The median age was 6.11 ± 3.65 years old. Medulloblastoma (n = 66), low-grade glioma (n = 52), and high-grade glioma (n = 40) were the most common tumors. The mean duration of follow-up was 21 months. At the time of this analysis, there were 105 (53 %) children alive, 82 (41.4 %) deaths, and 11 (5.6 %) lost for follow-up. The survival rate was 51.68 ± 5.22 %. CONCLUSIONS: In contrast of high rate of death in this study, other general characteristics can serve as benchmark for improving our care for children with brain tumors in Iran.
