Disaster medical assistant team establishment and the disaster response experience of Ethiopia

Authors

  • Woldesenbet Waganew
  • Akilili Azazh

Abstract

AbstractBackground: Disasters, especially natural disasters, are inevitable and occur globally, which affect communities. Therefore, countries are recommended to have a system for disaster management. The Minister of health-Ethiopia established a disaster medical assistance team as part of disaster countermeasures. The present study describes the establishment, operation, and challenges of the team (1,2,3,4).Objective: The aims of this analysis are to review the disaster medical assistant team establishment and disaster response experiences in Ethiopia.Methods: A desk review and analysis of secondary data for the disaster medical assistant team establishment and disaster response experiences in Ethiopia.Result: In August 2018, the ministry of Health-Ethiopia took the first step-in health system development history by establishing and having a successful achievement in the medical disaster response system. Some of the achievements are basic training, which had been cascaded to 678 multi-disciplinary professionals, through the deployment of the team to mass gathering events, and different disaster responses. The team was involved in conflict-based causality responses in Metekel Benishangul Gumz region in 2018, 2019 Ethiopian plane crash, COVID 19 response, and Tigray region mass causality response following incident since October 2020. Since the birth of the team, DMAT faced structural, security, lack of adequate necessary resources challenges. Due to pushing factors in the course of time, the active national team number decreased by 48.57% currently.Conclusions: The ministry of Health encouraged an appreciable step in the establishment, as well as through disaster responses in early phases, however, its success was not maintained and the status of DMAT indicated that it may become obsolete unless corrective interventions are implemented. [Ethiop. J. Health Dev. 2021: 35(SI-4):00-00]Keywords: Disaster, Health, response

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Published

2021-12-27

How to Cite

Woldesenbet Waganew, & Akilili Azazh. (2021). Disaster medical assistant team establishment and the disaster response experience of Ethiopia . The Ethiopian Journal of Health Development, 35(4). Retrieved from https://ejhd.org/index.php/ejhd/article/view/4738

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