Building the Plane While it\u27s in the Air”: Examining Institutional Response to COVID-19 and Impacts on Graduate Students

As a result of institutional neglect and under preparation, graduate students threaded their way through the COVID-19 pandemic and racial injustices across the U.S. with minimal to no support and resources. In this manuscript, we discuss the oversights in institutional response, and management of these crises, explicating the difficulties that ensued from the academy’s failure to anticipate, critically consider, and meet the nuanced needs of graduate students before and during the COVID-19 crisis. We also highlight intersectionality as a valuable framework that enables us to identify, analyze, and address the range of concerns of graduate students. Lastly, we posit three recommendations that institutional leaders can consider as they develop critical encompassing crisis management plans that center graduate students and their unique needs, while striving to create equitable educational environments for them. Specifically, we urge higher education stakeholders to: engage intersectionality in institutional decision-making, empower graduate students through collaboration, and apply lessons learned from both current and past crises

What happens before, during and after crisis for someone with dementia living at home: a systematic review

Background People living with dementia often experience crisis. Home treatment of crisis is an alternative to hospital admission that can have better outcomes. This systematic review is about people with dementia living at home and in crisis. It identifies modifiable factors in the crisis process that may facilitate crisis resolution. Methods The protocol is registered on PROSPERO. A systematic search of MEDLINE, EMBASE, CINAHL, AHMED, PsycINFO, Cochrane Library and references of retrieved publications, identified empirical research in English language and date range January 2000 to February 2019. Two researchers independently screened abstracts, selected publications and extracted data using a framework based on published guidelines. This is a report of the analysis and narrative synthesis. Results The search identified 2755 titles and abstracts, 76 were selected for full-text examination and 13 agreed for inclusion. The included studies evidence that: for a person with dementia, crisis is a process that begins with a problem judged to put them or others at risk of harm. It leads to decision and action to treat this risk, thus resolve the crisis. Such crisis can be predicted or unpredicted and progress quickly or slowly. Medical treatment, community resources and psychosocial support of personal resources, decision making, relationships and social networks, are all modifiable factors that can treat the risk of harm during crisis. Carers’ and professionals’ knowledge and skills in dementia care are likely to play a key role in crisis resolution in the home. Conclusion There has been limited investigation of the process and management of crisis at home for people living with dementia. The results of this review provide a foundation for future research. There is no consensus on critical components of home treatment to facilitate crisis resolution. However, education in dementia care for carers and professionals is likely to prove essential to successful home treatment

Decision support for medical disasters: Evaluation of the IMPRESS system in the live Palermo demo

Abstract Background In medical disasters, coordination, information flows, and decision making are crucial for response and management. Different factors contribute to thwart the response efforts. Some are due to the coordination of the many agencies active in disaster response. Support tools for gathering and analysing data may support task assignment, resource allocation, and acquisition as well as training at different decision levels (in the field and in command-rooms). Validation of Decision Support Systems (DSS) in simulated contexts, simulating real situations, becomes mandatory. In the framework of testing and validation of the IMPRESS project (and of its INCIMOB and INCIMAG tools), one scenario was planned in Palermo, a city of 700,000 inhabitants in the Mediterranean Area of Southern Italy, simulating the sudden liberation of high concentrations of toxic compounds from a fire in Palermo harbor. Emergency Agencies, a real and a simulated Hospital and operators in the field used the system during the response phase. A group of 20 external Observers participated for evaluation purposes. During a joint debriefing session, ad-hoc questionnaires were administered. IMPRESS was useful in improving the execution of important functions during the DEMO; Users agreed about the advantages of the use of IMPRESS tools for conducting crisis activities. INCIMOB use resulted more problematic from an operational point of view. Shortcomings were detected and criticisms were raised due mainly to the lack of training and direct voice communication. Evaluation of DSS in Emergency medicine can benefit from live exercises to highlight weaknesses in both the response system and decision support

Software services for supporting remote crisis management

Crisis management specifies a series of functions or processes for the identification, analysis and forecasting of crisis issues, and the statement of specific ways that would enable an organization to prevent or cope with a crisis. There are some existing techniques for crisis management. However, to our knowledge none of them is focused on the integration of telemedicine acts especially during transportation phase and also between health structures for saving more lives. Therefore, we propose a novel methodological framework for remote crisis management with three main phases: (1) Crisis definition (2) Crisis Analysis and (3) Crisis Management. The Crisis Management phase is based on the organized collaboration of various acts of telemedicine: Teleconsultation, Teleexpertise, Telemonitoring, Teleassistance, and Medical regulation. Each act of tele- medicine provides services to others and can be represented in Software as a Service (SaaS). SaaS design principle considers a software application as a service from which we propose some collaborative services to solve complex crisis management problems. The case studied and modeled concerns the simulation exercise on the Tsunami crisis management in Cannes (France), especially during the transportation phase of patients to various health structures. The proposed methodology adds an additional layer in terms of remote collaboration and information management to improve the management of emergencies and safety, with a view for contributing to protect and save lives when minimizing damages. The expected benefits (main findings) for using the considered approach are not only to provide crisis managers with a relevant computerized decision support system, but also to minimize financial costs, reduce the response time and positively impact the crisis management

A Semantic loT Early Warning System for Natural Environment Crisis Management

An early warning system (EWS) is a core type of data driven Internet of Things (IoTs) system used for environment disaster risk and effect management. The potential benefits of using a semantic-type EWS include easier sensor and data source plug-and-play, simpler, richer, and more dynamic metadata-driven data analysis and easier service interoperability and orchestration. The challenges faced during practical deployments of semantic EWSs are the need for scalable time-sensitive data exchange and processing (especially involving heterogeneous data sources) and the need for resilience to changing ICT resource constraints in crisis zones. We present a novel IoT EWS system framework that addresses these challenges, based upon a multisemantic representation model.We use lightweight semantics for metadata to enhance rich sensor data acquisition.We use heavyweight semantics for top level W3CWeb Ontology Language ontology models describing multileveled knowledge-bases and semantically driven decision support and workflow orchestration. This approach is validated through determining both system related metrics and a case study involving an advanced prototype system of the semantic EWS, integrated with a reployed EWS infrastructure