Health response during disaster: Considerations before lending a hand

First Haiti, then Chile. Hurricanes, typhoons, tsunamis, people displaced by famine and drought. Disasters strike with unfortunate frequency, impacting health, economies, development, stability the world over. With each event, humanitarian efforts are launched, leaving many people to ponder their role. Send money? Jump on a plane to lend a hand?

A perspective just published in the New England Journal of Medicine lists key considerations for potential responders. Even those with advanced medical training, or much needed search and rescue, civil engineering, logistics or epidemiology skills, can contribute to disaster if they simply show up. It's not enough to arrive with valuable skills and good intentions, you must be prepared to operate in an extremely challenging, low resource environment. So the authors, who include an emergency physician from the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine and the Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response at the US Agency for Health and Human Services, advise the following:

1. Seek formal training in working in disaster areas. If you have medical training, organizations such as the Red Cross, medical associations, and specialty societies often offer such training.

2. Register with existing humanitarian response organizations. They may also offer training, as well as appropriate credentials and logistical support.

3. Mind your own health first. Be sure you have appropriate vaccinations, prophylactic medications, and understand how to protect yourself from common infectious diseases that ravage post-disaster areas.

4. Understand that you are likely to face traumatic situations that can have long-term mental health implications. Are you mentally prepared to face death, destruction, despair and anguish on a large scale?

5. Consider when your skills are most needed: In the immediate rescue and response period, or the reconstruction and recovery that follows? If it is the latter, be prepared for a long-term commitment.

The type of work you end up performing may be unexpected. Even seasoned responders are sometimes surprised to find that their most important job ends up being something administrative such as onsite data entry or managing social media.

This raises another point: NGOs assessing health needs on the ground are flooded with data that they often have to process onsite, in the midst of the chaos they are responding to. Is there a way that the good intentions and nimble skills of volunteers around the world could be put to work compiling and (for those adequately trained) analyzing such data? There are logistical considerations: how to get data out of a disaster area. And there are trust and management considerations: Finding competent volunteers, validating and ensuring their accuracy and timeliness, and finding an NGO who is willing to take the chance of working with you. But tackle such hurdles, and concerned onlookers the world over could lend a meaningful hand in easing suffering from the relative comfort of their cubicles and living rooms.