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

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.. 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.. 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 (1st to 4th day after disaster), the sub-acute phase (5th to 14thday) and the recovery phase (after the 14th day), and finally the appropriate team combinations in every phases are offered..