Brian Dolan

Disaster response in an earthquake zone: UK nurse Brian Dolan recounts how care teams responded to the destruction caused earlier this year by an earthquake in christchurch, new zealand

The recent earthquake in Christchurch, New Zealand posed several challenges to emergency service personnel charged with rescuing civilians trapped in collapsed buildings and to medical teams, who were required to treat patients in emergency departments and makeshift treatment centres. This article reports on how good disaster responses ensure that survivors can receive the care they need, quickly and efficiently.

What history teaches us

It may not always sit comfortably but, like it or not, history shows us that many of the developments in nursing have arisen from changes in medicine.

Partnerships not punishment

From January 5 2004, social services in England will be hit by a £100-a-day surcharge on any patient waiting in hospital because a placement in social or residential care cannot be found.

Team work in the proper sense

Triage does seem to be a bit of an unloved child these days. However, rumours of its demise are greatly exaggerated. While there is a view that there is no evidence that triage is effective, as Jill Windle notes in her Editorial Boards eye view on page 9 , triage allows order to be borne of chaos and gives an ever changing and indeterminate patient caseload a sense of organisation.

More powerful than all the armies

Things are undeniably tough in A&E departments at the moment. Little apparent respite in trolley waits, a sense that ward colleagues are being less than supportive of the extreme pressures facing emergency department nurses and patients, and little evidence of government money for reforming emergency care being translated into improvements in the system. It is easy to let ones head drop and feel things will never get better.

Differing attitudes to care.

There are two schools of thought on how to address and deal with patients who present to emergency departments. The first is one where people are made to feel their concerns are legitimate; they are received with a smile and information is gleaned from them at the patients speed rather than the nurses. The second takes the view that if you smile at patients they will think they can spend half the morning telling you their woes, and that when you are extremely busy, it is best not to get too bogged down in the niceties, besides, patients need to understand that an emergency department is a stressful, busy place for staff.

Believing in our own abilities

Someone rather neatly described RCN Congress, which was held in Bournemouth last month, as the professions opportunity to take its own pulse. Well, whatever the prophets of doom might have you believe, the corpus that is the body of nursing is in remarkably rude health, despite the assaults on its morale, the viruses of being undervalued for so long, and the haemorrhage for years of some of its most experienced staff.