19. Putting it together

Abstract

The goal of these Guidelines is to benefit populations at risk through improving the quality of responses to the health aspects of disasters. This will be achieved through the development of methods that open disasters to structured, reproducible research, and thereby contributing to the science of health disaster management. Five major barriers were identified that impaired our ability to attain these goals: (1) lack of a endorsed terminology (2) lack of a standard descriptive system for society and its functions; (3) lack of structured description of disaster phases based on their properties; (4) widely distributed grey literature; and (5) no common structure to reports. In response to these findings, many commonly held processes have been deconstructed into a total of four frameworks, the use of which should help in meeting the goal. The use of the frameworks should provide further insight into the epidemiology of disasters in addition to the insight of the value of interventions provided for relief, recovery, and/or preparedness, once a disaster occurs or a hazard has been identified. The way forward should include the development of consensus on definitions used in the health aspects of disasters and for a repository of interventions applied in specific settings that include their respective effectiveness in attaining the goal for which they were selected. In addition, existing literature and future reports should be forced into the frameworks to facilitate our understanding and to develop the science of health disaster, evolution of standards, best practices, and competencies, but also to test and further improve these Guidelines. The frameworks should be augmented by standardised data collection instruments including templates for the gathering, organisation, and synthesis of data.