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Sign Me Up: Rules of the Road for Humanitarian Volunteers During the Ebola Outbreak

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 October 2014

Ryan Wildes ,
Stephanie Kayden Open the ORCID record for Stephanie Kayden [Opens in a new window] ,
Eric Goralnick ,
Michelle Niescierenko ,
Miriam Aschkenasy ,
Katherine M. Kemen ,
Michael Vanrooyen ,
Paul Biddinger  and
Hilarie Cranmer
Ryan Wildes
Affiliation:
Partners Healthcare Risk and Insurance Services, Boston, Massachusetts.
Stephanie Kayden
Affiliation:
Division of International Emergency Medicine and Humanitarian Programs, Department of Emergency Medicine, Brigham and Women's Hospital, Boston, Massachusetts.
Eric Goralnick
Affiliation:
Brigham and Women's Healthcare, Boston, Massachusetts.
Michelle Niescierenko
Affiliation:
Global Health Program, Boston Children’s Hospital, Boston, Massachusetts.
Miriam Aschkenasy
Affiliation:
Center for Global Health, Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston, Massachusetts.
Katherine M. Kemen
Affiliation:
Partners HealthCare Emergency Preparedness, Boston, Massachusetts.
Michael Vanrooyen
Affiliation:
Harvard Humanitarian Initiative, Boston, Massachusetts.
Paul Biddinger
Affiliation:
Partners Healthcare and Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston, Massachusetts.
Hilarie Cranmer*
Affiliation:
Center for Global Health, Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston, Massachusetts.
*
Correspondence and reprint requests to Hilarie Cranmer, MD, MPH, Director of Global Disaster Response, Center for Global Health, Massachusetts General Hospital, 100 Cambridge St, 15th Floor, Boston, MA 02114 (E-mail: hcranmer@partners.org).
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Abstract

The current Ebola outbreak is the worst global public health emergency of our generation, and our global health care community must and will rise to serve those affected. Aid organizations participating in the Ebola response must carefully plan to carry out their responsibility to ensure the health, safety, and security of their responders. At the same time, individual health care workers and their employers must evaluate the ability of an aid organization to protect its workers in the complex environment of this unheralded Ebola outbreak. We present a minimum set of operational standards developed by a consortium of Boston-based hospitals that a professional organization should have in place to ensure the health, safety, and security of its staff in response to the Ebola virus disease outbreak. (Disaster Med Public Health Preparedness. 2014;0:1-2)

Keywords

voluntary workersdisease outbreaksdisaster medicineemergency responders
Type
Responder Tools
Information
Disaster Medicine and Public Health Preparedness , Volume 9 , Issue 1 , February 2015 , pp. 88 - 89
Copyright
Copyright © Society for Disaster Medicine and Public Health, Inc. 2014 

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References

REFERENCES

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