On July 31, 2016, IMCRA held its 4th major colloquium/workshop in Japan titled,"The Long-Term Caregiver Experience: Patients, Providers, Pragmatics". The need for this event became especially pressing after the Kumamoto earthquake. Because there is still little easily-accessible practice data on the long-term medical/psychological pitfalls of disaster recovery we have begun to update our professional guide modules for families and healthcare providers in both regions of Japan
It has been 5 months since the destruction in Kumamoto. Despite all we learned from the Tohoku earthquake and tsunami of 2011, there remain serious gaps in our efforts to optimize the response to future catastrophes. Kumamoto is a case in point. Alarmingly, there is still little available on the longitudinal health aspects of disaster recovery. This is critically valuable information for Japan now and ultimately the rest of the world - and should be made available quickly.
Following this conference and workshop, we are making what we've learned in Japan over the past three years available as: 1) 24 online and smartphone-accessible advisory modules for family and caregivers, 2) enduring hard-copy print and DVD versions of same, 3) Multiple onsite educational events, 4) Interactive telemedicine access to expert medical opinion 5) A Conference Proceedings published in the American Journal of Disaster Medicine as a comprehensive reference source.
While our colloquium and workshop were covered live and recorded for permanent access via our websites this is information that remains obscure for communities at large in Japan, as well as for many physicians in east Asia. Accordingly, our expert interactive native-language modules are being expanded, updated and reconfigured as handbooks and publications to meet the new challenges faced by long-term medical care providers in Kumamoto..and ultimately elsewhere as needed.
This project has provided additional documentation in a DOCX file (projdoc.docx).
