Recent natural disasters such as the mudslide in Washington State, reports of tornadoes and the coming hurricane season reminds us about preparation, response, recovery and mitigation of further emergencies.
by Samantha Stainburn
Kenneth C. Rondello, M.D., M.P.H., the academic director of Adelphi’s emergency management program and an assistant professor in the College of Nursing and Public Health, knows that responding to disasters is an unpredictable business.
Dr. Rondello is always on call as a member of one of the federal government’s Disaster Medical Assistance Teams (DMAT), groups of 35 physicians, nurses and support personnel who are flown to regions of the country that are overwhelmed by disaster. DMATs, which can operate for 72 hours without support, provide primary and acute care and triage of mass casualties until local medical workers regain control of the situation. Dr. Rondello was deployed with his team to help after Hurricanes Gustav, Hanna and Ike in 2008 and a record-breaking flood in Tennessee in 2010.
“Disasters require you to adapt on the fly; it’s never routine,” he says. For nurses in a hospital, that might mean going to a different area of the building and doing work they don’t usually do. For emergency responders, that could mean transforming a gutted store into a temporary hospital, as Dr. Rondello’s team did in Texas after Hurricane Gustav.
But planning for disasters is still essential, he says. Dr. Rondello’s research interests include disaster epidemiology (using epidemiologic methods to assess the adverse health effects of disasters and predict consequences of future disasters), alternate medical treatment sites and distribution points, and epidemic and pandemic planning and response. To mitigate the consequences of any disaster, he says, it helps to map out the likely scenarios of different types of disasters and identify the people, property and environments that are most at risk in each scenario. “You can’t foretell all possibilities,” he says, “but for those you do identify, you need to be specific enough that you can plan for concrete action.”
This piece appeared in the Erudition 2013 edition.
