Can you help me write my story? The institutional affiliations of authors of international journal articles on post-disaster health response

Abstract

Introduction

Public health policies are, in part, shaped by evidence from peer-reviewed journals. Traditionally these papers have been predominantly written by practitioners with academic affiliations or field based colleagues wanting to share lessons learnt – particularly following a disease outbreak, emergency or disaster.

Typhoon Haiyan left a corridor of destruction across the Philippines which affected the lives of 14 million people, devastated a health system and challenged every sector of the country.  The destruction was unprecedented even for one of the world’s most disaster prone countries.  In our PubMed search at the time of this writing, thirty-one peer reviewed papers have been written about the Typhoon – twenty two of these relate to the health sector.

Immediately following the Typhoon the World Health Organization Country Office (WHO-PHL) was one of the first agencies on the ground– working together with the Philippine Department of Health (DOH) co-leading the health response.  Together we co-ordinated over 150 foreign medical teams and more than 500 tonnes of medical supplies and equipment for the response.  Many lessons were learnt from this experience.

Eighteen months after the Typhoon we undertook to write a compendium of papers describing some of those lessons.  During that process it appeared to us many  papers, just like the ones we were writing, were being written predominantly by academics, practitioners and responders who were external to the affected country and commonly, it seemed, with little or no involvement of academics, practitioners and responders ‘inside’ the affected country. Gaillard and Gomez looked at published articles related to the 15 largest disasters (by number of deaths) over the last decade and found almost all of the deaths occurred in disasters in non-Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) more than 58% of related publications were led by authors from OECD countries. 

We felt this under-representation and imbalance, particularly in the health sector, warranted further investigation.  The objective of this paper is to describe the results from our review of post-disaster, health related, peer-review publications over the last five years.  Looking specifically at who is writing about these emergencies and disasters (events).