Journal of Novel Physiotherapies
Open Access

Abstract

There are only some international articles where the role of physiotherapy in disaster management is highlighted. It is important to go through those articles and learn how the Physiotherapist contribute in activities before and after disaster. Having the advance knowledge in possible roles and responsibilities in disasters is called individual preparedness. The individual preparedness can be done through referring the resource articles available in internet. In fact, disaster preparedness starts from personal, family, community and the country level. Nepal faces the disasters like floods and landslide in every monsoon mainly due to the complex topographical structures. Various studies in previous years ranked Nepal as one of the prone country for seismic hazards. With these prior predictions, Nepal faced catastrophic earthquakes on 25th April and 12th May 2015. 8789 people were dead and 22309 were injured. Proper injury management and rehabilitation is one of the important priority now and this is not possible without the physiotherapist. With the live experience of recent earthquakes, it has been realized that the working scenario for physiotherapist during the disaster time is completely different than the usual scenario due to following reasons: Unpredictable occurrence of disasters disturbs the person emotionally and brings lots of mental stress that includes physiotherapist too; high caseloads may not fulfill the overwhelming injury management and rehabilitation needs, it induces heavy work load; mental stress is prevalent in addition to the physical injury on all survivors. Therefore management should be always coupled with the psychosocial first aid. In less resource setting like ours, it�s equally important to build up the capacity of physiotherapist in disaster preparedness and management. Though, disasters and its associated damage are always catastrophic, it is also an opportunity to flourish and prove the impact of services so that the national health system owns it appropriately.

Biography

Email: rehabphysio699@gmail.com