EMERGENCY PREPAREDNESS AND RESPONSE (EPK)
1. Emergency
a) What is an emergency?
An emergency is a situation that poses an immediate risk to health, life, property, or environment. Most emergencies require urgent intervention to prevent a worsening of the situation, although in some situations, mitigation may not be possible and agencies may only be able to offer palliative care for the aftermath.
Besides that, an incident, to be an emergency, conforms to one or more of the following, if it:
• Poses an immediate threat to life, health, property, or environment
• Has already caused loss of life, health detriments, property damage, or environmental damage
• has a high probability of escalating to cause immediate danger to life, health, property, or environment
b) Classify type of emergency.
Dangers to life
Many emergencies cause an immediate danger to the life of people involved. This can range from emergencies affecting a single person, such as the entire range of medical emergencies including heart attacks, strokes, cardiac arrest and trauma, to incidents that affect large numbers of people such as natural disasters including tornadoes, hurricanes, floods, mudslides and outbreaks of diseases such as cholera, Ebola, and malaria.
Dangers to health
Some emergencies are not necessarily immediately threatening to life, but might have serious implications for the continued health and well-being of a person or persons (though a health emergency can subsequently escalate to life-threatening).
The causes of a 'health' emergency are often very similar to the causes of an emergency threatening to life, which includes medical emergencies and natural disasters, although the range of incidents that can be categorised here is far greater than those that cause a danger to life (such as broken limbs, which do not usually cause death, but immediate intervention is required if the person is to recover properly). Many life emergencies, such as cardiac arrest,...