Various disasters have been continuously occurred in Korea from 1990s to now. However, there is no substantial improvement against damages as compared with the past due to various reasons such as lack of fundamental recognition, ineffective response systems and widespread insensitivity to safety. More worse, new types of disasters have been frequently generated due to rapid changes in social structures and industrial development, unusual changes in weather and changes of international situation. These disasters request comprehensive countermeasures.
In particular, while material damages by disasters can be recovered, the losses of precious lives cannot be recuperated in any ways. Thus, it is critical to set effective disaster medical plans. The first way to minimize damages by disasters is the prevention and the next is to set the disaster medical plans focusing on preliminarily activating the emergency medical system to rapidly rescue and take appropriate emergency medical services for casualties in the early stage when any disaster occurs. Nevertheless, no sufficient researches or references do not exist up to now. Even worse, effective emergency medical systems that play critical roles in increasing survival rates of casualties in actual disaster areas is not deployed.
For the United States, the consistent countermeasure system is established in FEMA through a close cooperative system with relevant organizations for serious accidents including terrorists´ attacks or natural disasters. For the emergency medical services in disasters, the disaster medical plan is set to cope with any disasters in perfect order by special area as operating the National Disaster Medical System-ESF#8 Role by FEMA. Accordingly, we need to set the extensive and integrated disaster prevention system for rapid and flexible operation against various kinds of serious accidents.
This study identified overall problems in disaster control plans in Korea and suggested how to improve the emergency medical service system in disaster areas. Furthermore, it aims to prepare the basic data to set the effective emergency medical service plans when substantial casualties break out and more reasonable and systematic disaster control plans to cope with the future occurrence of serious disasters.
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