SGEM Xtra: Welcome to the Jungle of Disaster Medicine

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Date: April 21, 2026

Lauren Openshaw

Guest Skeptic: Lauren Openshaw is a medical student at the George Washington University School of Medicine & Health Sciences, Class of 2027, where she is a part of the Disaster Medicine Scholarly Concentration. Her clinical interests include pediatrics, disaster medicine, critical care, and emergency preparedness, particularly as they relate to protecting vulnerable children during natural disasters and public health crises.

Background:

Floods, fires, hurricanes, blizzards, cyberattacks, hospital surges, the list goes on. Disasters are no longer just movie events or rare abstractions. These are real-world events that disrupt and change how we care for patients and families.

We spend a lot of time in training learning how to manage sepsis, trauma, asthma, etc. But disaster medicine? For many learners and clinicians, that part of the curriculum is thin, fragmented, or missing entirely.

Not every medical school has a disaster medicine concentration. There is typically very minimal formal teaching around disasters, if any, in the medical school curriculum.

Today, we’d like to introduce our audience to a new Free Open Access to Medical Education (FOAMed) resource, the Disaster Medicine Handbook, which we like to call the front door to disaster medicine.

Tune in to the podcast to hear Lauren’s perspective on this resource and how she’s used and contributed to it.

The Gap

Let’s start with the basic question: why create something like this at all?

Many trainees, nurses, Emergency Medical Services (EMS) clinicians, and even attending physicians may have heard of terms like surge capacity, incident command, crisis standards of care, evacuation, decontamination, and major incident triage. We know these things matter, and they affect children, families, hospitals, and communities.

However, there’s often no good starting point in disaster medicine for students, residents, or other learners.

That’s the space the Disaster Medicine Handbook is trying to fill. It was built for the person who is curious, motivated, maybe a little intimidated, and looking for a place to begin.

It depicts key topics in disaster medicine in a friendly, digestible format that also incorporates a pediatric lens.

That idea of an entry point is really important. This is not trying to replace formal disaster training, advanced courses, or deeper reference material. It’s trying to do something else: help someone say, “Okay, now I finally understand the basics in words that make sense.”

Plain Language

One of the things we like most about many existing FOAMed resources and what we’ve adopted for the Handbook is that it starts from a very simple premise: explain disaster medicine in normal words.

Disaster medicine is full of technical language, acronyms, frameworks, and systems terminology. That can be useful once you’re in the field, but it can also become a barrier for people who are just trying to understand the fundamentals.

We love this quote attributed to Einstein, “Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.”

That’s the balance we try to strike. We recognize that disaster medicine, with its various frameworks and systems, is complex. Our goal is to make it more understandable and accessible.

We want it to pique interest and give people that “aha” moment that unlocks a complicated concept, leaving them curious to learn more. Which is why we have references and resources to further material.

Bite-Size, Choose-Your-Own-Adventure

These are bite-sized chapters. Short, focused, digestible pieces that you can read in one sitting.

After a busy clinical day, it’s hard to sit down and read a giant textbook chapter or digest a dense academic article. We often try to learn between other tasks or during parts of our day, before a conference, on our commute, or during a quiet moment in the department. Maybe even in the ten minutes after seeing something pop up in the news, you realize, I should probably understand this better.

It’s built like a choose-your-own-adventure.

You don’t have to start at page one and go in order. You start with your question.

If you want to understand triage, start there. If you’re interested in surge, start there. If you want to know how to prepare children and families, start there.

That kind of navigation matters because curiosity is not linear.

Lauren has used and shared this resource a few times. Tune in to hear how she’s used it.

Peer-Reviewed and Living

The next piece is quality and evolution. FOAMed sometimes gets a bad rap because some people believe it’s not high-quality, even though it hasn’t undergone the traditional peer-review process. (There are potential issues around peer review which have been written about elsewhere.)

The Handbook is peer-reviewed by subject matter experts. In fact, the content and chapters are reviewed by many experts who provide comments and feedback before publication.

It is a living resource. It is not static. Our goal is for it to grow, change, and improve over time. Balancing the evolution and quality of the resource is important to us. On the one hand, it stays dynamic. On the other hand, it still has rigour.

Community

Maybe the most distinctive part is that this resource is built around community.

There’s a forum where learners and contributors can suggest revisions, flag areas that need clarification, propose new topics, and even contribute to writing future chapters. This was inspired by the community around Don’t Forget the Bubbles.

It changes the relationship between the audience and the resource. You’re not just passively consuming content. You can help shape what comes next.

Some of the early visible contributors are medical students and trainees. That sends a strong message that we value the learner perspective and that this field is open to you.

For our audience:

Go check out the Disaster Medicine Handbook.

Don’t worry about reading everything. Just pick one chapter that catches your eye. Read it. See if it helps something click.

And then join the forum.

Ask a question. Suggest a revision. Propose a topic. If you’re a learner and you’ve ever thought, “I wish someone would explain this better,” this is a chance not only to learn but to help build the resource you wish you had.

Remember, the goal here is not to turn everyone into a disaster medicine expert overnight. It’s to create a clear and welcoming first step. A front door.

The SGEM will be back next episode, doing a structured critical appraisal of a recent publication. Trying to cut the knowledge translation window down from over 10 years to less than 1 year using the power of social media. So, patients get the best care, based on the best evidence.