Floods are Severe Natural Disasters

Floods are Severe Natural Disasters    Floods are severe natural disasters that occur when dry land is submerged by an overflow of water. They can be caused by tsunamis in coastal regions, heavy rainfall, a tropical cyclone, or rapid snow melting. In particular, floods cause widespread devastation that might result in loss of lives and destruction to properties and health infrastructure. For instance, between 1998 and 2017, floods affected over 2 billion globally (World Health Organization, 2022). The most vulnerable individuals are those who reside in floodplains and lack warning systems so that they can evacuate before floods occur. The paper focuses on floods, fundamental principles of healthcare incident management, injuries, and how interagency cooperation and local collaboration can be effectively utilized.
Floods fit into the fundamental principles of healthcare incident management. In particular, healthcare incident management entails gathering data, analyzing, interpreting, reporting, and coming up with strategies to promote patient safety and the quality of services provided. The fundamental principles of healthcare incident management involve preserving and protecting victims of natural disasters, safeguarding properties, and stabilizing the scene of disaster (Hendrickx, Hoker, Michiels, & Sabbe, 2016). Floods align with these principles since they adversely affect individuals. Without a proper disaster response mechanism, many people can die from floods. That is why healthcare providers take precautions to ensure that many individuals are saved from floods when they occur. For example, people in areas affected by floods must be evacuated so that they do not die from drowning or disease outbreaks. In most cases, the flood water carries their properties away and destroys or submerges their buildings. However, healthcare incident management ensures that people affected by floods get proper assistance and medical attention.
Disaster triage refers to the process of sorting and categorizing patients based on the degree of severity, injuries, or availability of transportation and medical facilities (Elbaih & Kalas, 2020). Unlike other natural disasters, floods affect people in different ways and some of the victims might not show any physical injuries. Apart from those who are saved from drowning and others who might be hit by falling objects, it is challenging to triage victims. For example, some might get heart attacks, be electrocuted, fall into hidden manholes, have chemical poisoning, be stressed, and starved. However, since some of these things cannot be seen, it can be difficult to sort victims so that they can get the most appropriate help. For instance, an individual who has been saved from drowning is likely to be depressed, particularly if it is the first time the person to experience flood. As a result, healthcare providers must be very observant to identify the victims’ needs and address them accordingly.
The various types of injuries that are most likely to occur due to flooding include lacerations, trauma from falling objects or debris, and hypothermia. Victims are exposed to water-borne infections, such as hemorrhagic fever, malaria, and dengue. Floods are prevalent and cause around half of the deaths from natural calamities. They account for about 40% of natural disasters (Ohl & Tapsell, 2000). Other diseases that individuals affected by floods are likely to suffer from include typhoid, respiratory infections, leptospirosis, and diarrhea, including dysentery and cholera. Due to the lack of adequate food supplies, people influenced by floods are likely to have malnutrition. Many deaths that occur during floods are caused by drowning. In that light, healthcare providers must be able to identify the different types of injuries that individuals affected by floods are experiencing and help them accordingly. Since some people are depressed due to the loss of their loved ones and property destruction, counseling is crucial and can help them to recover by accepting reality and being helped to rebuild their lives.
Some issues might uniquely affect vulnerable populations, such as children and elderly adults, during floods. Specifically, floods influence individuals differently regardless of their severity. When it comes to children and the elderly, they are unlikely to save themselves and without help from others, they can easily drown (Yu et al., 2020). For example, these individuals cannot swim for an extended period awaiting assistance from first responders. Notably, age can make people more or less vulnerable to flooding. In most cases, during natural disasters, people do everything to save themselves before they think of those close to them. On that note, if children and elderly adults have no one to help them, they do nothing, which is why they are likely to drown. They are enti...