Discussion Questions.

Public Health Implications of Disasters

Week 10 – Managing the Public Health Datastream: Surveillance and Communications

Overview

One reason that disasters evolve in a chaotic fashion which we know to be a disaster is that communications is nonexistent or on its way to being so early in the event. If truth is the first casualty in war, then timely and accurate information is the first casualty in disasters. One of the reasons those of us in emergency medicine and other emergency health care fields enjoy what we do is that there is the ever present challenge to make a good decision in the face of incomplete or inaccurate information. There is no other choice in the disaster setting. However, it is incumbent upon disaster management experts to rectify the information flow issues as quickly as possible during an incident. As you will find out this week, deciphering what exactly is happening to the public’s health during a disaster is immensely important to development of mitigation and response strategies and sometimes to instituting the proper medical therapy.

Reading

Journal articles

1. Shawn Varney, et al. Update on Public Health Surveillance in Emergency Departments. Public health surveillance in EDs.pdf

Discussion Questions

1. Varney and Hirshon list seven general rationales for providing ED-based public health surveillance. Surveillance is a critical form of communication for public health officials. Choose a real public health outbreak, disaster, or crisis. Provide one example of how any of the concepts described in this paper were actually used to improve public health. Describe the intervention for your classmates. Cite your reference.

– APA Style.

– Kindly, answer all discussion questions clearly and completely.

– 2 References at least.