The first annual Yale New Haven International Congress on Disaster Medicine and Emergency Management will be held September 10-13, 2005, at the Omni New Haven Hotel at Yale in New Haven, CT, and is being organized by the Yale New Haven Health System (YNHHS) Center for Emergency Preparedness and Disaster Response (Center), in collaboration with the Yale University School of Medicine, the World Association for Disaster and Emergency Medicine (WADEM) and the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO). The broad goal of the conference is to bring together an expert of civilian, governmental and military physicians, scientists, researchers and other health care professionals with expertise and interest in emergency preparedness to discuss current best practices developed in the fields of emergency management and disaster medicine; provide a venue for physicians, scientists, healthcare professionals and researchers to share results and information; and provide tools and programs that can be adapted and implemented within their organizations and jurisdictions to strengthen and enhance coordinated and integrated emergency response. This proposal is seeking AHRQ funding to support dissemination activities, including the cost of publishing abstracts, executive summaries and invited papers in upcoming editions of WADEM's journal of Pre-hospital and Disaster Medicine and the cost of transcribing the sessions presented at the congress. The congress is primarily a dissemination conference, where research findings will be summarized and communicated broadly to organizations and individuals that have the opportunity to use the information to improve the outcomes, quality, access to and cost and utilization of disaster medicine and emergency management services. The congress seeks to promote interaction between state, federal, and international public health practitioners and policy makers. Expert faculty from a variety of public and private, local, state, federal and international agencies as well as from academic entities will present on key topics such as clinical medicine, public health, and disaster response. The congress will also serve as a research development conference, where issues in the delivery of disaster medicine health services and emergency management are defined and a research agenda or strategy for studying them is developed.
