Publications by authors named "Lina Westman"
Introduction: Earthquakes are the most violent type of natural disasters and injuries are the dominant medical problem in the early phases after earthquakes. However, likely because of poor data availability, high-quality research on injuries after earthquakes is lacking. Length of hospital stay (LOS) has been validated as a proxy indicator for injury severity in high-income settings and could potentially be used in retrospective research of injuries after earthquakes.
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- A study was conducted on 1,871 patients injured in the 2008 Wenchuan earthquake to analyze injury patterns, causes, and socio-demographics, focusing especially on those with multiple injuries.
- Out of these patients, 45.8% had two injuries, 9.0% had three, and only a few had four or five, with significant anatomical clustering observed among different injury types.
- The most common injury combination was a double-fracture, affecting 20.7% of those with two injuries, indicating a notable correlation in the types of injuries sustained.
The number of reported natural disasters is increasing, as is the number of foreign medical teams (FMTs) sent to provide relief. Studies show that FMTs are not coordinated, nor are they adapted to the medical needs of victims. Another key challenge to the response has been the lack of common terminologies, definitions, and frameworks for FMTs following disasters.
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