FbT Journal Club - November 2020

In disasters, information exchange is vital for gaining adequate situation awareness that enables emergency mangers and health personnel to make well-informed decisions. However, in such stressful situations where there is high stress levels, too much or incomplete information and limited time to make decisions, effective communication between response agencies becomes very challenging and may end up in substandard or sometimes unavailable healthcare provision. Much frustration is experienced by disaster responders due to receiving too much, and sometimes irrelevant information and missing out on important data items that could have improved the quality of response had it been received timely. Therefore, there is a need to strike a balance between having adequate situation awareness and controlling information overload. An attempt to strike this balance has been followed by investigating the impact of defining a ‘Minimum Dataset’ (MDS) for disaster healthcare, which may facilitate the communication, and the subsequent collaboration and coordination needed to deliver quality healthcare services to disaster victims.