WHO / Yoshi Shimizu
A WHO field staff talks to a woman fetching water from a water catchment tank in Kiribati.
A WHO field staff talks to a woman fetching water from a water catchment tank in Kiribati.
©
Credits
Emergency Medical Teams
Disasters, outbreaks and other emergencies can overwhelm the resources and capabilities of health-care systems. In some cases, they lead to increased demand for health services due to trauma or illness. Disasters can also damage health facilities and outbreaks may also affect health workers, limiting the ability of the health system to meet needs.
Countries must be able to provide care to people in need, and to do so where those people are located. This means having deployable, self-sufficient clinical capacity in the form of field hospitals or field clinics that can provide life-saving care to those affected by health emergencies - known as Emergency Medical Teams, or EMTs.
EMTs can provide routine outpatient care, manage emergency and trauma cases, manage mass casualty incidents, and safely stabilize and refer patients for higher level care. In addition to clinical expertise, EMT team members are trained to work in the most challenging conditions, establishing field hospitals that are fully self-contained, limiting demands on local resources that may already be stretched in an emergency context.
WHO/Karen Hammad
Tuvalu Ministry of Health, Fiji Emergency Medical Assistance Team, and WHO transfer to a smaller boat on their way to Nukufetau, one of the atolls in Tuvalu, for the COVID-19 response.
Tuvalu Ministry of Health, Fiji Emergency Medical Assistance Team, and WHO transfer to a smaller boat on their way to Nukufetau, one of the atolls in Tuvalu, for the COVID-19 response.
©
Credits
Emergency medical teams in the Region
Since 2013, WHO in the Western has supported the development and quality assurance of both national and international EMTs across the Region. The Western Pacific hosts 12 of 40 internationally classified EMTs, and national teams have been developed in nearly every Member State in the Region, from Mongolia in the far north to New Zealand in the south, and in both the largest and smallest countries.
Over the past year, EMTs have supported multiple emergency response efforts, including for COVID-19, measles outbreaks, cyclones, earthquakes and even a volcanic eruption and tsunami. Several EMT’s achieved international classification in 2022-2023, while some of the longest-standing EMTs in the Region have recently been re-classified following many deployments over the past five years, demonstrating their ongoing commitment to supporting health emergency response across the region and around the world.
