Health in Emergencies and Disasters Quarterly
Volume:8 Issue: 1, Autumn 2022

Hospitals are a symbol of social welfare and the last refuge of patients, which is the most important issue of the health system. Patient safety is the first and most important issue for the health system. Before COVID-19, the World Health Organization (WHO) defined the Hospital Safety Index (HSI) to measure hospital preparedness for disasters. During the COVID-19 crisis, hospitals faced many problems, including safety. Governments and health officials need to pay attention to fire safety. In the Covid-19 crisis, different conditions were experienced in hospitals, and the number of patients, inpatients, medical staff, equipment, and machinery in these critical conditions has increased significantly. This article in the form of a letter to the editor tries to point out the challenges and opportunities of hospital safety index tools to reduce hospitals’ vulnerability to improve their performance and resilience to disasters.

Providing emergency shelter for disaster victims is a part of disaster risk mitigation strategies. International organizations have proposed a framework for appropriate planning and emergency shelter design. These agencies are encouraging local authorities to manage events to use existing structures such as schools, community centers, etc., as emergency shelters for the victims. According to the social religious and spiritual status of mosques in communities, these centers are one of the crucial elements to create a safe and trusted shelter during disasters. This study aims to identify the role of mosques as emergency shelters in disasters.

This study was a systematic study that searched the words related to the research title (disaster management, emergency shelter, mosque) with AND, OR operators in PubMed, Web of Sciences, Science Direct, and Scopus databases, and the Google scholar search engine, as well as Persian language databases of SID, Magiran, Irandoc, and Iran Medex. A three-step screening process was used to select studies using the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews And Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) checklist. Finally, the data were analyzed thematically.

Out of a total of 175 articles found, 6 articles were relevant to the purpose of the study and were analyzed. The results of the present study showed that mosques can be suitable shelters for risk management during accidents and disasters. Also, in this regard, a range of strategies for designing programs for public participation and mosques were identified. 
 

The services and the role of mosques in disaster occurrence as a shelter are very effective and these valuable services can be further extended using social capital, attracting the attention of religious institutions, and public participation.

This study was conducted to analyze the lived emotional experience of adolescents during the prevalence of COVID-19 and quarantine. The research method was phenomenological qualitative. To achieve information saturation, 25 adolescents aged 15-17 years were purposefully selected and responded to the research tool which was a semi-structured interview individually and online. After analyzing the six main themes of boredom, loneliness, homesickness, helplessness, stress, anger, and fear of judgment were extracted from the available data. The results of the present study are consistent with empirical evidence showing that although restrictions on quarantine are unavoidable, facilitating conditions to meet mental needs and maintain mental health, such as creating interpersonal relationships and supporting adolescents in critical situations, should be considered by healthcare providers, trainers, and parents.

In different crises without any exception, especially sudden emergencies, the role of human effective components (HECs), native human effective components (NHECs) (belonging to a specific space and location), and especially core native human effective components (CNHECs); and among CNHECs, level of management skills, ignorance, and manager’s mind bandwidth are of vital importance in crisis management. These three specified CNHECs can affect crisis management and managers as well as the level of latency in planning, strategy, and management, and as such through a complexity of reactions (i.e. A. affective, B. behavioral, and C. cognitive reactions) to increase resiliency and decrease distress in metropolitan urban areas. The time limitation is also an important issue to be considered. 

The type of review method has been integrative review. For a better review process, 200 articles during an approximately 50-year time (1972-2021) period during 3 years of the review process were studied and for the selection method, the well-known scientific databases and universities, the search terms, and inclusion/exclusion criteria were selected, analyzed, and summarized through a review protocol.

We aim to shed light on HECs preparation of NHECs and CNHECs in disaster management which will generate a good understanding to increase the resiliency and decrease the distress in crisis managers in times of sudden emergencies in metropoles as a sustainable development framework for the future. 

By creating the proposed taxonomy and classification of CNHECs in crisis management (managers), at first a better understanding will be obtained which in times of sudden crisis can increase resiliency and decrease distress generating a sustainable development framework.

Measuring end-tidal carbon dioxide (ETCO2) can be a non-invasive, fast, and reliable method to predict partial pressure of carbon dioxide (PaCO2) in patients with respiratory distress. This method, which can be a suitable substitute to measure PaCO2, is being used in many emergency rooms and operating rooms in developed countries, but its exact relationship with PaCO2 has not been confirmed yet. This study aims to investigate the relationship between PaCO2 and ETCO2 in patients with respiratory distress referred to the emergency.

Arterial blood gases were measured in patients referred to the emergency room of Hazrat Rasool Akram (PBUH) Hospital with the main complaint of respiratory distress, and the ETCO2 of the patient was measured simultaneously with a capnograph. At the same time, the blood pressure and body temperature of the patients were also measured. The obtained information was collected in a sheet and statistically analyzed using SPSS software, version 15.

A total of 120 patients were included in the study whose mean age was 48.3. The Mean PaCO2 and ETCO2 were 47.45 and 26.9, respectively. The mean respiratory rate was 37.4 and diastolic (89.9) and systolic (124.9) blood pressure. A total of 48.33% of patients were women. Statistical analysis showed a significant relationship between PaCO2 and ETCO2 (P=0.0001; CC=0.436). Linear regression analysis showed that ETCO2 predicts PaCO2 with R=0.424.

A good correlation was found between PaCO2 and ETCO2 and this correlation was higher in diseases such as sepsis and COPD. Variables such as age, sex, and blood pressure did not affect this correlation. Of course, more studies on healthy people are necessary to confirm these findings.

Physical access to health services is determined by the geographic location of the patient. This study aims to distribute the bases and hospitals of Mashhad City, Iran, and the extent of coverage of the bases in traffic accidents.

This research is a descriptive cross-sectional and applied study. The study population for high-accident points includes 21142 missions carried out regarding traffic accidents as well as 37 points related to 115 emergency bases in 2014. The information needed by the researcher was collected by receiving the files of the injured from the statistical unit of the center. By forming the database of the road network in Mashhad City in a geographic information system environment as communication links and defining emergency centers as facilities, the radius of emergency centers was drawn using the service area method. 

In this study, the areas that needed more services and the number of provider centers was less compared to the covered area were identified. After matching the distribution map of the bases with the distribution of accidents, the areas with the lowest distribution of accidents and the highest service of emergency medical services, as well as high accidents and less service were obtained. 

The distribution of bases and hospitals does not have a proper distribution situation, which can lead to the lowering of the desired level and the creation of illogical concentration. To cover the emergency missions, it is necessary to set up emergency bases and complete the existing hospitals in the city.

Iran has a uniquely catastrophic status for road traffic injury and fatality. Fars province has had the highest number of casualties among the other provinces in recent 5 years. For instance, there are 966 road accident fatalities in 2018. Shiraz-Kazerun road is the deadliest one in Fars province. So, to help the policymakers toward better planning, this study was established to identify and prioritize the significant factors in traffic casualties of the Shiraz- Kazerun road during the spring of 2018 from the experts’ point of view.

This study was conducted using a three-phase mixed method. The first step was to identify the effective factors in road traffic fatalities using available resources. In the second step, the identified factors were arranged in the form of a checklist and were provided to a team of experts. The important factors were distinguished according to local priorities, availability of data, and the contribution of each factor to the deaths of people. The consensus was considered higher than 75% agreement by experts on each identified factor. In the end, these factors were ranked according to experts’ views in the form of a seven-point Likert scale. Data were analyzed using Excel software and mean parameter.

According to panel consensus, 33 out of 41 effective factors were identified in the road traffic accident which were divided into five different categories: driver-pedestrian-passenger, vehicle and equipment, physical environment, non-physical environment, and health services. After analyzing the data, factors of age, seat belts, traffic lanes, police monitoring, and accessibility of the accident scene had the highest values. 

This study specifies the need for a systematic and responsive process to evaluate, report, and prioritize the factors affecting road traffic fatalities scientifically. Considering the limitation of resources, policymakers can emphasize more effective factors like fastening seat belts to reduce road traffic accident impacts.

Pre-hospital emergency medical services are one of the vital parts of the health system, which was created to timely diagnose and treat patients injured in life-threatening conditions. The use of motorcycles has increased in recent years to reach the golden time standard and overcome traffic in some countries, especially Iran. This study was conducted to investigate the effectiveness of a motor ambulance compared to an ambulance in Tehran City, Iran.

The present study is a cross-sectional descriptive-analytical type. The time to reach the patient’s bedside, death at the scene, and physiological parameters of the patient at the time of delivery to the hospital were studied as effectiveness indicators in this model. Since the primary data on the effectiveness of these two interventions is mortality, according to previous studies, the mortality data should be converted into the form of prevented mortality and enter the analysis phase. In this study, since the mortality index is expressed as a percentage, the difference in the mortality index from 100 was estimated as the prevented mortality index and entered into the analysis.

The results showed that the chance of death in the motor ambulance group with an ambulance in severe level patients is 44.8% and 66.9% in the ambulance group. In the motorcycle and ambulance group, the probability of death for patients with mild and moderate injuries was estimated at 0.02% in ambulance missions and 0.7% in motorcycle and ambulance missions (P=0.05). 

According to the desired outcome (reduction of death), the use of motor ambulance with ambulance was effective in severe group patients. Of course, this outcome alone cannot be an accurate basis for judgment, and outcomes such as survival, disability-adjusted life years, and quality-adjusted life years seem necessary for a more accurate evaluation.