2021 Volume 26 Issue 2 Pages 55-61
In recent years, the frequency of occurrence of natural disasters has increased around the world. ASEAN, especially, has often suffered serious human and economic damages from large scale disasters. Therefore, ASEAN leaders emphasize that the regional cooperation and capacity development for disaster prevention and response in the ASEAN region is essential. Japan, as a natural-disaster-prone country, has vast experience and knowledge of disaster response and disaster medicine, including deployment of international and domestic emergency medical teams (EMT) in affected areas. JICA conducted “the survey on the Current Situation of Disaster/Emergency Medicine System in the ASEAN Region” (November 2014–August 2015). Based on the results of this survey, JICA, in cooperation with the Thai government, has been conducting “the Project for Strengthening the ASEAN Regional Capacity on Disaster Health Management （ARCH project）” since July 2016, with a three-year project period. The ASEAN Regional Collaboration Committee (RCC) was established as a coordination platform under the ARCH project, and five RCC meetings were held in order to oversee the activities of the ARCH Project and make recommendations on regional collaboration mechanisms on disaster health management. As a framework for the practice of regional collaboration, a Regional Collaboration Drill (RCD) was conducted five times. The host countries of the RCD were able to test their systems and policies, including coordination mechanisms, among relevant disaster management organizations for disaster response, assuming a large scale disaster such as can be anticipated to happen in each host country. As tools for regional coordination, Standard Operation Procedures (SOP) for EMT Coordination in ASEAN, Minimum Requirements for personnel in EMTs, Health Needs Assessment Framework for EMT, and a Database of EMT were also developed. These tools were actively tested in the RCDs and the results were fed back to enable improvement. Training programs for the ASEAN Member States (AMS) were conducted four times in terms of medical knowledge/skills necessary for EMT members, systems/procedures for deploying and receiving international EMT, and EMT coordination mechanisms. At the 31st ASEAN Summit in 2017, the ASEAN Leader’s Declaration of Disaster Health Management was adopted, which included the results and outputs of this project. The three-year project has been extended for another 21 months to further strengthen the disaster medical cooperation mechanisms in the ASEAN region.
