The Johns Hopkins Office of Critical Event Preparedness and Response (CEPAR) has released a standalone Windows application to help hospitals calculate the potential casualties in their area after a WMD attack. The application takes input things like type of pathogen or chemical used, wind speed, and population density, and provides guidance as to what to expect in terms of types and numbers of casualties.
From Johns Hopkins:
Called EMCAPS (Electronic Mass Casualty Assessment & Planning Scenarios), the software program is believed to be the first that generates the anticipated outcomes of disaster planning scenarios developed by the Department of Homeland Security. The scenarios include patient estimates by injury type, estimated level of care required, and the need for decontamination facilities.
Developed by CEPAR and programmed by the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory, EMCAPS’s details are reported in the February edition of the Annals of Emergency Medicine. The program is available for download free of cost from Johns Hopkins’ CEPAR Web site, http://www.hopkins-cepar.org/
“Comprehensive disaster preparedness planning requires the ability to expand care capabilities in response to sudden or prolonged demand,” says James J. Scheulen, lead investigator for the EMCAPS project, executive director of CEPAR and chief administrative officer of the Johns Hopkins Department of Emergency Medicine.
“While the planning scenarios developed by the Department of Homeland Security form a good basis for constructing disaster exercises, EMCAPS adds value by giving hospitals a platform for providing a needed level of detail and accounting for local conditions that influence health care demand and response in their regions,” says Meridith Thanner, Ph.D., a CEPAR research associate and program manager with the National Center for the Study of Preparedness and Catastrophic Event Response.
When designing the program, EMCAPS developers selected eight of 15 Department of Homeland Security scenarios that could result in large-scale health effects: inhalation anthrax; plague; food contamination; blister, nerve and toxic agents; dirty bombs and improvised explosive device (IED) attacks. The remaining scenarios, including natural disasters and cyber attacks, were excluded from the program because of either insufficient information for computer modeling or low casualty probability as a result of an attack.
Free download and info page: Electronic Mass Casualty Assessment & Planning Scenarios – EMCAPS
Press release: JOHNS HOPKINS OFFERS FREE SOFTWARE TOOL FOR LARGE-SCALE DISASTER "SURGE" PLANNING
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