Disaster documentation: improving medical information-sharing in sudden-onset disaster scenarios

Abstract

This study investigates clinical practitioners’ use of medical documentation during sudden-onset disasters in order to better understand how we can improve practice. Thirteen participants, representing nine nationalities and six clinical disciplines (with the collective working experience of at least 15 different organisations providing disaster response), underwent semi-structured interviews using an inductive approach based in grounded theory. The initial codes and themes were analysed over four coding rounds and developed into selective codes. The findings suggest that documentation is overwhelmingly de-prioritised in disasters due to competing demands; there is little incentive to complete documentation at an organisational or government level; practitioners acknowledge the importance of and need for adequate documentation; paper documentation still has its place whilst electronic approaches have both benefits and drawbacks; and disasters require bespoke documentation solutions. Development of the emergency medical team (EMT) ‘data management’ role within EMTs may be one way to focus teams on key areas of improvement.     

Displacing Marginalized Bodies: How Human Rights Discourses Function in the Law and in Communities

In this article, we examine disability and eugenics discourses and the ways they function in spaces where vulnerable persons have been historically excluded by the state and blamed for their own “immiseration.” We ask how queer theories of repudiation, abjection, and vulnerability lend insight into the ways that people with intellectual disabilities are discursively located outside normative discourses of home, care, and quality of life, and whether these discourses shifted to serve this vulnerable population when historically the very places in question repudiated them, infringed on their human rights, and questioned their sexuality. To address these questions, we focus on the recent and impending closures of Virginia’s Training Centers, residential institutions for persons with intellectual disabilities now scheduled for staggered closures before 2020.     

The Dutch Homo-Emancipation Policy and its Silencing Effects on Queer Muslims

The recent Dutch homo-emancipation policy has identified religious communities, particularly within migrant populations, as a core target group in which to make homosexuality more ‘speakable’. In this article we examine the paradoxical silencing tendencies of this ‘speaking out’ policy on queer Muslim organisations in the Netherlands. We undertake this analysis as the Dutch government is perhaps unique in developing an explicit ‘homo-emancipation’ policy and is often looked to as the model for sexuality politics and legal redress in relation to inequalities on the basis of sexual orientation. We highlight how the ‘speakability’ imperative in the Dutch homo-emancipation policy reproduces a paradigmatic, ‘homonormative’ model of an ‘out’ and ‘visible’ queer sexuality that has also come to be embedded in an anti-immigrant and specifically anti-Muslim discourse in the Netherlands. Drawing on the concept of habitus, particularly in the work of Gloria Wekker, we suggest that rather than relying on a ‘speakability’ policy model, queer Muslim sexualities need to be understood in a more nuanced and intersecting way that attends to their lived realities.