Hospital disaster plan and disaster medicine

Abstract

© Korean Medical Association This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License (http://creativecommons. org/licenses/by-nc/3.0) which permits unrestricted non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. In general, the disaster rescue team should do their work within 1 to 2 hours after disaster, and disaster medical assistance team (DMAT) should care the victims at disaster site within 3 to 6 hours. Since about 10 years ago, world health organization, world meteorological organization, and world congress of disaster emergency medicine emphasized that each countries should complete the disaster plan on ‘chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear, explosivesʼ (CBRNE) disaster. After these warnings, the most of countries has strengthened the hospital disaster plan, and also organized disaster services system such as DMAT, hazardous material information system, and others. In Korea, the most of tertiary hospitals can not operate hospital disaster plan effectively, and the government did not support hospitals on disaster plan politically and financially. As a result, only a small number of hospitals is operating DMAT, and a few hospital completed CBRNE disaster preparedness such as disaster drill, personal protective equipments, decontamination set. The poison information center that control information on hazardous material is not established yet, and most physicians can not get information on chemicals, biologics and other hazardous materials when CBRNE disaster occur. To operate effective disaster plan, each hospitals should modernize the disaster plan on internal disaster, external disaster, and CBRNE disaster. The government should support hospitals to keep DMAT and special preparedness on CBRNE disaster. When CBRNE disaster strikes, the poison information center should expand their capability to provide information on the various kinds of hazardous materials.