Operational Health : Conversations About Emergency, Disaster And Routine Healthcare Management.

In 2014, the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs funded a “Think Paper” about the use of new media in disasters. A subsequent meeting in Doha identified that standardisation of social media hashtags and enabling GPS during crisis could have major impact on integrating big-crisis data into emergency response going forward. Twitter, Pinterest, Facebook and other new media (including YouTube) are all in the mix, but it is twitter that is certainly the most immediate. It is from that foundation that Roxanne Moore wrote “Hashtag standards for Emergencies” with Andrej Verity. I explore the research with Roxanne and the discuss the impact of the research. We reflect on the use of social media in emergency situations, such as the Mumbai bombings, Arab Spring and Philipine floods, and how to tranform tweets into usable information for responding and deploying emergency resources. The publication “Hashtag standards for Emergencies” was developed by UN O