Overview and Disclaimer
Section 1
This Resource Guide provides quick access to current information on preparing for any emergency and accessing assistance. It is intended to help physicians and other health professionals recognize and respond to a potential mass casualty situation and notify appropriate authorities. The Guide promotes a comprehensive, all hazards approach to disaster planning, management, and response. The all-hazards preparedness concept allows agencies and individuals to prepare for multiple disaster or emergency
situations in a uniform, coordinated, and consistent way. Information is presented in two tiers:
- Immediate Response to an Emergency (key resources, charts, and other information that can be
accessed when time is critical) - Additional Resources (resources and information for further reference)
Please take the time to review the Guide, familiarize yourself with its contents and features, and learn from it so that you are better prepared to serve your community in an emergency. You may wish to print information from the Guide to keep with other reference materials for future use, especially if phone and power lines are disrupted.
This Resource Guide is a collection of public domain files culled from myriad Internet sources by the American Medical Association (AMA) Center for Public Health Preparedness and Disaster Response. It is designed as a convenient, user-friendly reference work, utilizing the benefits of the Adobe Acrobat format to uniformly present documents that can be reviewed rapidly or printed quickly, saving hours of tedious online or library searching and downloading. Throughout the files in the Guide, you will find underlined hyperlinks providing rapid navigation to key disaster management and emergency response information. Unfortunately, user software limitations may prevent some of these links from working correctly. At the time this product was in production all of the links were tested and working properly. If you encounter problems reading files from the Guide or have suggestions for changes or additions, please email AMA staff directly at: disastercd@ama-assn.org. Your comments are appreciated as we consider future revisions of this Resource Guide.
Disclaimer
Management of Public Health Emergencies: A Resource Guide for Physicians and Other Community Responders, is compiled and published by the AMA as a reference source of information on biological, chemical, radiation, and other disasters. It is intended to supplement, not replace, specific real-time research into critical disaster and emergency response topics. If you have a specific inquiry that requires up-to-date information, we urge you to visit the Web sites of the federal agencies and professional associations included in the Guide.
Most of the links in this Resource Guide are external to the AMA Web site. These are provided as a service and do not imply any official endorsement of or responsibility for the opinions, ideas, content, or products presented at these locations. The AMA cannot and does not guarantee or warrant that files available for downloading from other Web sites will be free of infection from viruses, worms, Trojan horses, or other code that may manifest contaminating or destructive properties.
Although the AMA undertakes reasonable efforts to keep the information contained in this Resource Guide accurate, the AMA does not warrant the accuracy, completeness, timeliness, merchantability, or fitness for a particular purpose of the information contained in this resource guide. In no event shall the AMA be liable to you or anyone else for any decision made or action taken by you in reliance on such information. The above warranties are the only warranties of any kind either expressed or implied including warranties of merchantability or fitness for any particular purpose.
The AMA is not responsible for errors, omissions, or inaccuracies in information of any kind, or for any damage or loss of any other kind involving clinician users, their patients, or other users, whether direct, indirect, or consequential, arising from or caused by use of or reliance upon any information contained in or distributed through this Resource Guide.
This Resource Guide is intended solely as an informational resource and no medical advice is provided or distributed from the guide. Users interested in medical advice or treatment must consult a properly licensed medical practitioner. Physicians and other health care professionals are advised to consult their usual clinical resources before prescribing specific products or drugs to their patients.
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This guide is also available free on CD-ROM. To obtain a copy, please contact Jim Lyznicki, MS, MPH at (312) 464-4520, or via e-mail at disastercd@ama-assn.org
