Rebuilding Healthcare Systems After Sudden Onset Disaster Essay

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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.

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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….....

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