Fundamental disaster and emergency medicine manuals launched in Bucharest

Several disaster and emergency medicine manuals, as well as handbooks for medicine residents and nurses were officially released in Bucharest on Wednesday. The titles launched are the Disaster Medicine Handbook - coordinated by doctor Henri Julien, president of the French Society for Disaster Medicine, Tintinalli's Emergency Medicine Manual: A Comprehensive Study Guide, Nancy Caroline's Emergency Medicine in the Streets, Sheehy's Manual Of Emergency Care: A Handbook for Nurses, Qualified First Aid, and the National Triage Protocol. The 6 titles are either books of reference from the international literature translated into Romanian and made available to specialists in the field, or materials entirely conceived by Romanian authors. "For the human resource to perform at top level, it has to be trained. Training doesn't mean just the basics, but it also involves continuous training. One of the major activities consisted in creating a package of handbooks and protocols to serve our colleagues in emergency services, starting with the most basic, up to the highest level. (...) Responding to an accident with dozens, maybe hundreds of victims is nothing like treating one, two or three patients simultaneously in an emergency ward, as a medic," said Secretary of State with the Ministry of Interior Raed Arafat. Disasters have no borders. Fortunately, the people involved in providing disaster emergency assistance know no borders either, neither in Europe nor in the world. Disaster medicine is a specialty in its own right. It cannot be invented, it doesn't allow for improvisation when arriving at the disaster scene. It must be taught, they must be trained. ... The purpose of this disaster medicine handbook is to spread essential knowledge for this medicine specialty. It's different from the emergency care practiced by doctors and nurses, or by the rescue personnel in daily situations. The techniques are different, the triage becomes very important in disaster medicine, said the coordinator of the Disaster Medicine Handbook, doctor Henri Julien. The event was attended by Swiss ambassador to Romania, Arthur Mattli, and Health Minister Sorina Pintea. The books were published under the Swiss - Romanian Cooperation Program - project 'Improving the quality of hospital and pre-hospital emergency services through the development and implementation of a training program'. AGERPRES (RO - author: Roberto Stan, editor: Mihai Simionescu; EN - author: Simona Klodnischi, editor: Simona Iacob)