Palliative Care Training for Work in an Austere Environment after a Natural Disaster

Palliative Care Training for Work in an Austere Environment after a Natural Disaster.

A natural disaster such as an earthquake, flood, or hurricane can
cause significant loss of life, destruction of property, and displacement of surviving populations. The mandate of medical teams who enter a disaster zone is to administer immediate medical care to the survivors.

In a mass casualty event, medical teams are trained to evaluate injured survivors based on the severity of their injuries, the acuity of their needs, and whether they will be able to survive from their injuries. Well-established triage systems categorize injuries based on an urgent need for care and survivability.

For instance, a common system includes the following categories: “immediate” where the
victim requires immediate life-saving treatment; “urgent” where the individual requires medical intervention within six hours; “delay” where the survivor has minor injuries or non-life threatening injuries and their care can be delayed; and “expectant” where the individual will not survive their injuries or where the extent of interventions required would overwhelm the medical system and take away resources for the treatment of other people with more survivable injuries.

Beyond the identification of patients to the “expectant” category,
medical responders receive little training about how to care for immanently dying patients during a disaster. This commentary reviews the challenges to care for this category of patient, the stresses on the medical providers, and some basic palliative interventions to provide comfort to the patient and their family members during this catastrophic time.

Palliat Med Hosp Care Open J. 2018; 4(1): 10-13. doi: 10.17140/PMHCOJ-4-128