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Prehospital and disaster medicine

October 9, 2026 · via Europe PMC

Flood Response in Rural Indonesia Implementing the World Health Organization Emergency Medical Team Minimum Data Set - Disaster Report.

Nagara AY, Holipah H, Andarini S, Sulistomo HW.

Journal ArticleAbstract only — full text under license

AI summary — for doctors, generated from the abstract only

A disaster report from rural Indonesian floods shows a pattern of skin, musculoskeletal and respiratory complaints and argues for adopting the WHO EMT minimum data set.

What was studied

A descriptive report of 363 consultations from three flood responses (2017, 2022, 2023) by the Universitas Brawijaya EMT, using the WHO EMT MDS for daily surveillance.

Key findings

  • Consultations peaked on Day 1 and then declined; 62% were female and 68.87% were adults aged 18-64
  • The most frequent conditions were skin diseases (33.46%), musculoskeletal problems (24.39%) and acute respiratory infections (16.64%)
  • Children mostly had respiratory infections, while adults and older people had more skin and musculoskeletal problems

Clinical relevance

Standardized reporting could improve surveillance, coordination and resource allocation in future disasters.

Who should care

Emergency Medicine

Limitations

Descriptive data from one team and one locality, no denominators or outcomes, and the policy recommendation goes beyond the data.

The report documents flood morbidity patterns and supports adopting standardized data reporting.

This is an AI-generated summary of the published abstract, not a clinical recommendation. It may not reflect the full text or subsequent updates — verify against the original source before acting on it.

Abstract

Indonesia experiences recurrent natural disasters that impose substantial strain on its health system, with annual flooding affecting rural communities such as Sitiarjo Sumbermanjing Wetan. Despite these recurring events, Indonesia has not systematically adopted the World Health Organization (WHO) Emergency Medical Team (EMT) Minimum Data Set (MDS) for standardized disaster medical reporting, thereby limiting data integration and evidence-based policy development. This disaster report describes the operational patterns, clinical demographics, and syndromic distribution captured by the WHO EMT MDS framework across three distinct flood responses in 2017, 2022, and 2023. The Universitas Brawijaya Emergency Medical Team (UB-EMT) prospectively collected daily surveillance data using the WHO EMT MDS reporting system. A total of 363 consultations were analyzed and stratified according to age, sex, and reporting period. Consultation volume peaked on Day 1 and declined on subsequent days. Females accounted for 62% of the cases and adults (18-64 years old) represented the majority of patients (68.87%). The most frequently reported conditions were skin diseases (33.46%), musculoskeletal problems (24.39%), and acute respiratory infections (16.64%), respectively. Age-specific patterns were evident: preschoolers and school-aged children presented with acute respiratory infections, whereas adults and older people more commonly experienced skin diseases and musculoskeletal problems. The absence of systematic implementation of the WHO EMT MDS constrains standardized surveillance and inter-team coordination in disaster settings. Therefore, the institutional adoption of the WHO EMT MDS is essential to strengthen real-time monitoring, optimize resource allocation, and enhance post-disaster evaluation in Indonesia.

DOI

10.1017/s1049023x26109078

PMID

42850832

Research metadata (titles, abstracts, authors, publication dates) is sourced from Europe PMC, which aggregates content from PubMed/MEDLINE, PubMed Central, and other providers under the U.S. National Library of Medicine (NLM/NCBI). NLM does not claim copyright on abstracts; the original journal publishers or authors may hold rights to the full articles. AI-generated summaries are derived only from the abstract, never the full text, and are always labeled as AI-generated.

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