EpiNurse Project
Temporary shelters for disaster survivors often become long-term residential units. Daily monitoring of shelter environment and direct data transmission of health risk ensure the health and safety of evacuees and communities. EpiNurses use ICT Toolkit to assess living conditions and provide crucial yet hard-to-collect evidences of communicable diseases and prevent an eruption of health threats.
Challenge 1:
ICT for human-centered DRR
We develop a disaster risk reduction method to ensure health security in disaster prone communities. Collaborating with local nurses, named as EpiNurses (Epidemiology+Nurse), who conduct a participatory monitoring by using ICT toolkit, the project aspires to protect and promote health and safety in shelters and communities.
Challenge 2:
Innovation of participatory monitoring
A community participatory approach to disaster risk requires greater human behavioral consideration on how people interpret and live with risks, and how individual perception, knowledge, attitude contribute to putting them in vulnerable situations. Geospatial information technologies could be an innovative approach for community nursing to early detection in more efficient manners. Among the technologies, smartphones offer a platform for analyzing local characteristics and individual behaviors relevant to the community health.
Challenge 3:
Business for unpaid care giver
Communities and government agencies are beneficiaries of our activities.
The advisors and colleagues from other countries can complement the assessment knowledge and skills and enhancement for health, as well as technological fronts adopted for disaster situations.
Main Feature
Case Station for Translational Research
Emergency health situations often occur as a consequence of a primary disaster of great magnitude due to its impact on the living environment. The relationship between the occurrence of a disaster and an outbreak of communicable diseases is reported to be associated with the size and characteristics of the displaced populations. The lack of infrastructure and resources and inexistence of disaster preparedness programs are among factors that contribute to increased risks of epidemics following a humanitarian crisis. Critical attention should be paid to hygiene control in shelters to maintain minimum health safety level. In this context, reducing risks involves changed behavior and lifestyle during a temporary settlement period after disaster. In local communities, nurses collect information about and mitigate communicable disease risks. Nurses may manage community’s health environment as well as hospital wards. They can play a vital role in restoration of public health under disaster condition (water, sanitation, food, and shelter) and in identification of high risk and vulnerable population including unique needs of family in disaster.
Ensuring Health as a Key Outcome of DRR
The assessment consists of simple software with paper and smartphone application, and it is in layman’s terms for local nurses who are main users. The items in this toolkit include living environment assessment and item of Surveillance in Post Extreme Emergencies and Disasters (SPEED), which was conceptualized to provide real time health information reporting after a disaster developed by WHO/WPRO, and a surveyllance item, which have been used by Ministry of Health. In this way, the toolkit was developed to create an Application Programming Interface (API) for data collection and sharing with other health sectors and national surveillance.
Public Health Center as Local Hub
At minimum, communication and regular social capital evaluation by EpiNurse could be undertaken. For this operation, good collaboration with government is also required for interoperability and rapid assessment with other data services and close partnerships with local volunteer. Public Health Center could be used as the local hub of this project.
This local hub also can create ripple effects. For example:
1. We will be able to find out the challenges and issues faced by communities, civil societies and the underprivileged from their point of view. This will help with clarifying and finding the solutions to the problem.
2. We can discover the solutions through new ideas and methods while also implementing innovative and modern business approach.
3. Continuity and development of the business will help achieve economic betterment.
