Decision Support for Strategic Disaster Management: First Release of a Wiki

Abstract

For successful emergency management (EM) it is crucial that all stakeholders, especially health care emergency responders, use the same terminology. Throughout the emergency management lifecycle it is necessary for individual agencies to work together, sharing information and resources. Emergency management is already a complex process, but a multi-agency response comes with added difficulties. Each agency has its own organisational cultures, structures, and technologies in place, managed by internal processes and systems. To address some of the challenges associated with a multi-agency response (e.g., lack of coordination, information, and interoperability), standardisation is promoted. By ensuring the use of shared terms, operational inefficiencies and delays can be reduced and a shared vocabulary can be promoted across multiple agencies. For this reason, the S-HELP Strategic Disaster Management wiki has been developed by University of Vienna, Austria (UNIVIE). The wiki provides main glossary terms, definitions, and standards to improve decision making. It is implemented as a part of the FP7-EU S-HELP (Securing Health.Emergency.Learning.Planning) project, which develops a Decision Support (DS) tool for EM and is coordinated by University College Cork (UCC), Ireland.