Disaster Medical Assistance Teams After Earthquakes in Iran: Propose a Localized Model

BACKGROUND: In the past 10 years, 13 fatal earthquakes have occurred in Iran and led to death of 30,000 people whom most of them were killed in the earlier hours of the disaster. Disaster Medical Assistance Teams are groups of trained medical and non-medical personnel with various combinations that on the optimal conditions are deployed just within 8 hours of notification and are able to work self-sufficiently for at least 72 hours without any outside help and can treat up to 250 patients per day. Currently there are no such rapid-response teams in case of unexpected events in Iran, which causes the responses to such disasters, not to be organized or practiced. For instance, there were many rescue forces in 2003 Bam earthquake but not enough skilled ones to cope with; consequently they themselves became a problem in crisis management instead of solving the problem. OBJECTIVES: In this study, we have investigated which of the following is more efficient: changing the size and combination of the team depending on the type of disaster and environmental conditions or, determine a fixed combination team. MATERIALS AND METHODS: Totally, several reasons for dynamic combination and size of the teams are presented. later, earthquake disaster is divided into 3 phases in terms of time including the acute phase (1(st) to 4(th) day after disaster), the sub-acute phase (5(th) to 14(th)day) and the recovery phase (after the 14(th) day), and finally the appropriate team combinations in every phases are offered. RESULTS: Regarding to introduction and considering the existing statistics in different legal Iranian resources and by division of the earthquake disaster to three phases including acute phase (1st to the 4th day after disaster), sub-acute phase (5th to 14th day) and recovery phase (after the 14th day) CONCLUSIONS: The countries pioneer in disaster medical assistance teams, now are inclined to deploy different teams consistent with each kind of disasters or with other effective components on the combination of system. Every disaster has its own condition and would require different combination of relief and medical forces. For example, people’s health needs in flood is different from the earthquake