Preventive Medicine in Humanitarian Emergencies

4.4. Establishing a System of Morbidity and Mortality Surveillance

After a disaster, it is critical that all health-care workers, both private and public, join together to form an integrated and coordinated system that records and reports diseases. This is one of the most important roles of health workers who are engaged in a traditional clinical consulting mode. To the clinician who is working long hours trying to treat as many patients as possible, gathering data may seem like a waste of time, but it is crucial for planning disaster response.

The ideal situation would be to have every health worker record the age, sex, and diagnosis of each patient. This information should be collected and recorded in a systematic way and provided in a timely manner to public health authorities so they can analyze it and rapidly respond to emerging health threats. In a sophisticated health-care system, electronic medical records can greatly facilitate this data acquisition.