M4ID has been supporting WHO South-East Asia in a regional campaign to raise public awareness and push governments to take concrete actions in making hospitals safe from disasters. In brief this means building them to withstand natural disasters, having emergency plans in place, training staff to respond and continue to provide services post-disaster.  We built a reaction tester on Facebook and have some 60,000 supporters, in addition to high-profile champions like Jet Li. The public show of support has been used by WHO at various regional Ministerial meetings and in country to get decision-makers on board, and several countries have taken action as a result (Nepal, Indonesia, India, Bhutan).  We also look to have a World Health Assembly resolution on this in May, which is very exciting.

The next phase is now focused on gaining greater awareness/support and also pushing hospitals to stand up and say what they have done to make their hospital safe from disasters.. we are hence building a Google maps component where hospitals can be recorded and can list their actions, as well as a game-oriented application on Facebook through which people are sensitized to the issue and can check out their hospital etc, the game will enable the supporter to compete against public personas known for their speed (the theme of the campaign continues to be ‘disasters strike in seconds, WHO needs you to react fast).  We look to launch this next phase in late April.

Yet thanks to thousands of online volunteers, more complete maps have been built to aid in both the Haiti and Chile response. For example, Crisis commons has a wiki page for the Chile earthquake, with a list of online tasks for volunteer helpers, including the Open street map project.  Various online communitites have also been started to support crisis mapping, among others by Google. The maps often contain specific info on the state of hospitals, location of camps, cut off roads and so on, as in the Ushahidi mapping project.

The below animation of the progression of the Openstreetmap coverage in south-western Haïti following the January 2010 earthquake illustrates the rapid global mobilization of volunteer mappers to assist humanitarian operations in the field:

M4ID will keep on learning, sharing information and helping move the agenda forward  in every way possible.  A big thank you to Tim for advocating on behalf of this important issue!