Rebuilding Healthcare Systems After Sudden Onset Disaster

Foreign medical teams are comprised of health care professionals in a wide range of fields and areas of specialization. Their primary goal is to treat persons affected by sudden disasters and emergencies. Foreign medical teams may work under the auspices of NGOs, governments, or international aid organizations like the Red Cross. The World Health Organization (WHO) has established a set of minimum standards foreign medical teams must meet in order to comply with evidence-based best practices. Those standards are outlined clearly in formal documents (WHO, 2013).

Because foreign medical team standards are becoming increasingly standardized, the drawbacks with using foreign medical teams may be minimized. Those potential drawbacks include miscommunication or lack of effective coordination between disparate teams and their presiding organization. Other drawbacks include the inability to provide ongoing or long-term medical services in ways that also help to relieve the burdens placed on the local, regional, or national health services affected by the disaster.

In many cases after sudden onset disasters, local health services may be severely disrupted, adding to the incredible burden of loss of life and casualties. Therefore, foreign medical teams are certainly effective and can be considered a necessary tool in supporting the recovery of the healthcare system after a disaster. Restoring the healthcare system after a disaster is a critical priority. Strengthening healthcare systems is in fact a cornerstone of community resilience, and can be considered part of the prevention and risk management process.

In situations in which emergency preparedness was relatively low, as in Haiti, the foreign medical teams can play a major role in helping the local community establish the systems and resources for long-range critical care planning. The goal in Haiti was not necessarily to rebuild the public health services to the condition they were prior to the onset of the disaster, but to create a "new standard of normalcy for the provision of healthcare delivery to the community," (National Academy of Sciences, 2015, p. 226).

Within a framework of building essential structures, institutions, and services, foreign medical teams include consultants and administrators. Foreign medical teams can be described as "complex adaptive systems" that can deal with the unique contingencies of not only the post-disaster landscape but also political, social, linguistic, and cultural challenges (O'Sullivan, Kuziemsky, Toal-Sullivan & Corneil, 2013, p. 238).

While the task of building essential services in countries besieged by both poverty and disaster seems daunting, foreign medical teams are comprised of individuals and groups from diverse backgrounds and are ideally capable of handling the complexities of the situation. By learning from past mistakes and responding to concerns and criticisms voiced by local stakeholders, foreign medical teams become increasingly effective in supporting the recovery of a healthcare system after a disaster.

A key first step is performing assessments in accordance with specific guidelines like those of the United States Department of Health and Human Services (2015), which state that assessing "disaster-related structural, functional, and operational impacts to healthcare facilities" can better help empower local healthcare teams for a long-range vision. Unfortunately, the earthquake in Haiti has been called a "medical shame," characterized by "bad practices" in spite of there being more than 400 medical NGOs (von Schreeb, n.d., p. 4).

The primary problem in Haiti was the lack of data and evidence informing best practices, and also the fact that there was, according to von Schreeb (n.d.), "no overview, no transfer, no coordination," (von Schreeb, n.d., 5). Clearly, foreign medical teams have a lot to learn from the errors of the past, and will be called upon in the future to provide more effective structural and administrative supports in post-disaster areas. References Brolin,.