By Yuki Ninomiya | Regional Director, IMCRA Japan
The Long-Term Caregiver Experience: Patients, Providers, Pragmatics - May 2016
It's a little over 5 years since the great East Japan earthquake and tsunami of 3-11-11. The event remains unique in history as the only time a populous and technologically-advanced global power was severely disabled by a natural catastrophe.
Despite all we learned from the disaster, there are serious gaps in our efforts to use the terrible events of 3-11-11 to optimize the response to future catastrophes. For example, the largely unheralded mobile medical and nursing professionals involved in the recovery effort for several years. These professionals now form a small and very precious class of people who have developed unique insights into how to best respond to the needs of the populations they have been serving month after month.
Last year, several IMCRA faculty proposed a colloquium/workshop to capture and organize the experiences of the healthcare providers regularly serving communities in Tohoku - especially Fukushima and Iwate. This is critically valuable therapeutic information for Japan - and importantly - for the rest of the world. Our ultimate aim is to gather together what we learn into a Conference Proceedings document which will be published in the American Journal of Disaster Medicine as an important source of reference for long-term healthcare providers worldwide.
Review of the current literature shows that there is precious little available on the longitudinal med and psych aspects of disaster recovery. The colloquium and workshop is now scheduled to take place in Sendai Japan on the 21st of May 2016. Your donations and support will help fund travel expenses for attendees and assure that this critically important event takes place. Following this conference/workshop, what we've learned in Japan will be available to the greater global good.
Links:
By Randy Seffren | Senior Operations Manager, IMCRA
By Dr. Thomas G. Hedberg | Executive Director - IMCRA
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