If a medical pandemic strikes, or there is a major natural disaster is there a generic step by step process of dealing with it that is followed to prevent human suffering?
For example, in human pandemics things like massive quarantines combined with vaccinating and treating everyone associated with the sick person is followed. This seems to be generically applied to all contagious diseases from anthrax to influenza.
What about natural disasters like earthquakes, hurricanes or floods, is there a generic step by step method of dealing with them or do rescue workers just wing it? Is providing security first, then amassing all the victims together and providing them with food/water/medicine, then providing them with new places to live in the meantime a systematic method of dealing?
Prioritize situations that need immediate attention (The fellow bleeding to death next to you should probably be tended to before you start handing out the emergency rations)
Take necessary action
Yeah, I know it’s vague, but it would pretty much have to be given the variety of possible situations that you would want this checklist for.
Well, I’m not sure if this is what you’re after, but most emergency responders on federal, state and local levels are trained to respond to incidents using “ICS”, or Incident Command System.
Basically, ICS is method of standardizing response to any incident, large or small, so that all the players are on the same page, as it were. It was developed in the 1970s in response to the shortcomings found is wildfire responses. ICS establishes who’s in charge of a response, a chain of command for all responders, communications procedures, etc, etc. It has become a very detailed and structured system over the years.
ICS can be used for just about any type of incident, large or small, but it doesn’t give you a step bu step break down on what to do. It gives the responding agencies a framework with which to work to avoid confusion, duplication of efforts, etc. However, all the different agencies that have a responsibility to respond to incidents will have contingency plans already in place for those incidents that they are most likely to respond to. Undoubtably, the CDC and FEMA will have some type of plan in place for an outbreak of some deadly disease, for example.
Also, for truly large incidents, the NIMS system would be activated. NIMS, or the National Incident Management System, is basically a much bigger version of ICS. ICS is a standard component of NIMS.
