The research, led by Zeliha Yelda Özer of Çukurova University Faculty of Medicine in Adana, together with colleagues from medical education, public health, and biostatistics, took a deliberately interpretive approach. Rather than measuring outcomes with surveys or checklists, the team conducted semi-structured, in-depth interviews with twenty family medicine resident physicians at a university hospital in Adana, a city close enough to the epicenters to feel the full force of the disaster yet far enough to serve as a major receiving center for the wounded. Interviews began on 19 January 2024 and continued until 7 January 2025, a timeline that allowed residents to reflect on their experiences after the most acute phase of the crisis had passed.

Methodologically, the study is grounded in hermeneutic phenomenology, a tradition that asks not simply what happened to people, but how they made sense of what happened. Each interview was audio-recorded and transcribed verbatim, then examined using thematic analysis within that interpretive orientation. The authors were careful about rigor in ways that matter for qualitative work: they practiced investigator reflexivity, meaning they explicitly examined how their own backgrounds and assumptions might shape interpretation; they kept field notes; they discussed emerging interpretations as a team; they returned findings to participants for validation; and they used bilingual checking to ensure that nuances survived the translation between Turkish and English. Reporting followed the Consolidated Criteria for Reporting Qualitative Research, the international standard for transparency in interview-based studies. Ethical approval came from the Çukurova University Faculty of Medicine Ethics Committee, and all participants gave written informed consent.

From this material, the researchers developed two main themes. The first they describe as existential disruption and contested professional duty. The second traces a movement from clinical unpreparedness toward systemic reappraisal. Together, these themes capture a psychological arc that is rarely acknowledged in disaster medicine literature: the collapse of the assumed boundary between the person who helps and the person who needs help. Residents described how threats to their own safety and to the safety of their families destabilized the very foundations of what they believed professional duty required. The implicit contract of medicine, that the clinician stands steady while the patient suffers, broke down when the clinician was also shaking, grieving, and uncertain whether loved ones had survived.

This dual identity, survivor and provider at once, is the conceptual heart of the study. Disaster planning in most health systems treats staff as resources to be deployed, not as members of the affected population. The residents’ accounts suggest that this framing is not only incomplete but potentially harmful. A physician who cannot reach their family, who does not know whether their apartment building will stand, and who is simultaneously asked to triage earthquake victims is navigating an ethical and emotional terrain for which no lecture hall prepares them. The study found that these competing demands did not merely cause stress; they forced residents to question what duty even means when the duty-holder is himself a casualty of the same event.

The second theme documents a more constructive transformation. Confronted with unfamiliar clinical assignments and disrupted organizational systems, residents began to redefine what competent disaster practice actually looks like. Instead of picturing competence as a body of theoretical knowledge memorized in training, they came to see it as something embodied, distributed across teams, and dependent on ethical support from the institution. In other words, the disaster taught them that resilience in medicine is less about individual heroism and more about collective function: knowing how to work with strangers, how to improvise within broken systems, and how to sustain each other morally when standard protocols no longer apply.

For readers outside medicine, the technical significance of this reframing is worth unpacking. Traditional disaster preparedness curricula emphasize knowledge transfer: mass casualty triage categories, incident command structures, infection control in field conditions. These remain necessary, but the Adana findings indicate they are not sufficient. Competence under catastrophe, as the residents experienced it, involves tacit, embodied skills, the ability to keep working while exhausted and frightened, to communicate across professional hierarchies that have themselves been disrupted, and to make ethically fraught decisions, such as allocating scarce resources, without clear guidance. Those skills are relational and contextual, which means they cannot be assessed by written examination alone.

The study’s conclusions translate directly into policy recommendations. The authors argue that disaster preparedness for resident physicians should combine practical training with psychological support and, crucially, with workforce policies that explicitly recognize clinicians may also be disaster survivors. That recognition has concrete implications: hospitals might plan for staff who need to locate family members before reporting for duty, provide childcare and shelter for personnel, rotate staff to prevent burnout, and embed mental health professionals within disaster response teams rather than offering counseling only after the fact. The findings also suggest that debriefing and peer support should be treated as core components of disaster response infrastructure, not optional extras.

It is equally important to note the boundaries of what this study can claim. As an interpretive phenomenological investigation conducted at a single university hospital, its purpose is depth of understanding rather than statistical generalization. Twenty residents in Adana cannot represent every clinician in every disaster. The authors themselves state that transferability to other settings should be judged in light of local health-system and disaster contexts. Still, the mechanisms they describe, the destabilization of professional identity when the helper becomes the victim, and the shift from individual to team-based conceptions of competence, are likely to resonate wherever disasters strike populated areas with functioning hospitals, from seismic zones to flood plains to regions affected by conflict.

The 2023 Türkiye earthquake was one of the deadliest seismic events of the modern era, and the international response, acknowledged by the study’s authors with gratitude to volunteer responders and medical teams from around the world, demonstrated both the power and the fragility of collective humanitarian action. What this research adds is a quieter, more personal layer to that story: the testimony of young physicians who stood at the intersection of catastrophe and care. Their experiences suggest that the next generation of disaster preparedness must be designed for whole human beings, professionals who grieve, fear, and doubt even as they work. If health systems take that lesson seriously, the residents of Adana may have contributed not only to the survival of their patients, but to a fundamental redesign of how medicine trains and protects its own.

Subject of Research: Experiences of family medicine resident physicians providing care during the 2023 Türkiye earthquake

Article Title: Experiences of family medicine resident physicians at a university hospital during the 2023 Türkiye earthquake: a qualitative study

Article References: Özer, Z. Y., Okyar, Ç., Yüce, S., Boz, A., & Arslan, Y. K. (2026). Experiences of family medicine resident physicians at a university hospital during the 2023 Türkiye earthquake: a qualitative study. BMC Health Services Research. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12913-026-15755-w

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1186/s12913-026-15755-w

Keywords: disaster medicine, family medicine, resident physicians, Türkiye earthquake, qualitative research, interpretive phenomenology, professional identity, disaster preparedness, health services research, psychological support, primary care, medical education

The study, led by George Teo Voicescu of CRIMEDIM, the Center for Research and Training in Disaster Medicine, Humanitarian Aid and Global Health at the Università del Piemonte Orientale in Novara, Italy, together with colleagues including Hamdi Lamine, Luca Ragazzoni and Marta Caviglia, set out to explore current monitoring and evaluation practices among disaster management training organizers. Monitoring and evaluation, often abbreviated as M&E, are two related but distinct activities. Monitoring refers to the ongoing, real-time tracking of a training course while it is running, allowing trainers to adjust content, pacing and methods as problems emerge. Evaluation, by contrast, typically happens after the fact and asks whether the training achieved its intended outcomes. In an ideal world, the two work together in a continuous feedback loop that steadily improves both the course and the competence of its graduates.

To understand how this loop functions in practice, the researchers conducted a prospective qualitative study using semi-structured online interviews. They deliberately sampled training organizers across diverse regions and operational contexts, contacting 53 individuals and ultimately enrolling 15 participants. The interviews were audio recorded, transcribed with pseudonymization, and subjected to thematic analysis, a qualitative method in which researchers systematically code transcripts to identify recurring patterns and themes. The team reported the work in accordance with the Consolidated Criteria for Reporting Qualitative Research, known as COREQ, a checklist designed to improve the transparency and rigor of interview-based studies. Ethical approval was obtained from the ethical review board of the Iuliu Hatieganu University of Medicine and Pharmacy in Cluj-Napoca, Romania, and all participants provided informed consent.

The first striking finding was heterogeneity. The training development process, the formats and the content of disaster management courses varied enormously across the interviewees. Some organizers followed established instructional design frameworks such as ADDIE, which stands for Analysis, Design, Development, Implementation and Evaluation, or evaluation models like CIPP, which examines context, input, process and product. Others relied on ad hoc approaches shaped by institutional habit or funder expectations. Courses ranged from short intensive workshops to extended programs covering topics as varied as major incident medical management, exemplified by frameworks like MIMMS, the Major Incident Medical Management and Support course, and broader disaster planning. This diversity, the authors note, is not inherently a weakness, but it makes standardized assessment extremely difficult, because a measurement tool designed for one type of course may be meaningless for another.

The second major finding concerned the imbalance between monitoring and evaluation. Both activities were valued by the trainers interviewed, but evaluation was frequently prioritized over monitoring. The dominant evaluation method was the pre-post survey, in which trainees rate their knowledge or confidence before and after a course. While such surveys are easy to administer, the study suggests they often capture little more than satisfaction or self-perceived learning, rather than genuine operational readiness. Monitoring, meanwhile, was often informal or absent altogether. The researchers warn that this lack of monitoring might drastically affect short courses in particular, because without real-time feedback trainers have no opportunity to improve the course while it is still ongoing, potentially leaving participants poorly trained by the time the course ends.

Underlying much of this superficiality, the interviewees suggested, was the influence of funders. Evaluation was often guided by funder requirements rather than by a genuine desire to improve training quality. When the primary audience for evaluation data is a donor or an administrative office demanding completion reports, the resulting instruments tend to measure accountability rather than learning. The study also points to a structural problem in the workforce itself: most disaster management trainers are operational professionals, not educational experts. They bring invaluable field experience to the classroom, but they may lack formal training in pedagogy, assessment design or measurement theory. Relying on such trainers to invent their own unstandardized monitoring and evaluation approaches, the authors argue, can be suboptimal, whereas dedicated M&E teams could professionalize the field in the same way that specialized quality assurance functions have improved other high-stakes industries.

The consequences of weak assessment extend beyond the classroom. After action reports from real disasters consistently identify disaster management training as fundamental to effective response, which means that flawed evaluation does not merely produce misleading course certificates; it obscures the true state of operational readiness across the emergency response system. A trainee who completes a course with high satisfaction scores but limited actual capability may be deployed into a crisis believing they are prepared. The study explicitly warns that current practices give limited insight into operational readiness and can create a false sense of preparedness among trainees. In a field where lives depend on performance under extreme pressure, that gap between perceived and actual competence is not a bureaucratic inconvenience but a safety issue.

What do the trainers themselves want? The interviewees recommended a flexible, user-friendly monitoring and evaluation platform dedicated specifically to disaster management, one that would support long-term tracking and follow-up of trainees over time and include networking capabilities connecting trainers, organizers and alumni. Long-term follow-up is particularly important because the true test of disaster training is not performance on a final quiz but the retention and application of skills months or years later, when a disaster actually occurs. A dedicated platform could also help standardize core metrics while remaining adaptable to the heterogeneity of courses, and the authors suggest that mixed methods approaches, combining quantitative indicators such as key performance indicators with qualitative insight into the learning process, could provide a more comprehensive understanding of how disaster responders actually learn.

The researchers are careful to acknowledge the challenges inherent in any such solution. Disaster management courses are short, their topics are diverse, and their training methodologies vary widely, so any monitoring and evaluation system must be adapted to these constraints rather than imported wholesale from other educational domains. There are also risks associated with centralized platforms, including the administrative burden they may impose on trainers and the possibility that standardized metrics could flatten the very diversity that makes disaster training responsive to local contexts. The authors argue that DM-adapted tools could more accurately assess trainees’ readiness to work and that a well-designed platform could fill existing gaps while mitigating the risks associated with it, a balance that will require careful design and consultation with the training community itself.

The study emerges from the International PhD in Global Health, Humanitarian Aid and Disaster Medicine organized by the Università del Piemonte Orientale, and the authors received no external funding for the work, declaring no competing interests. As climate change intensifies hazards and urbanization concentrates populations in vulnerable regions, the demand for disaster management training will only grow, and with it the stakes of getting assessment right. This study does not claim that disaster training is failing; rather, it reveals that the field currently cannot prove it is succeeding. By giving voice to the trainers who deliver these critical courses, the research lays the groundwork for a more professionalized, evidence-based approach to building the competence that disaster response ultimately depends on, one monitored session and one meaningful evaluation at a time.

Subject of Research: Monitoring and evaluation practices in disaster management training

Article Title: Monitoring and evaluating disaster management training: a qualitative study of trainers’ perspectives

Article References: Voicescu, G. T., Lamine, H., Ragazzoni, L., & Caviglia, M. (2026). Monitoring and evaluating disaster management training: a qualitative study of trainers’ perspectives. BMC Medical Education. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12909-026-10465-7

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1186/s12909-026-10465-7

Keywords: disaster management, monitoring and evaluation, medical education, qualitative research, training assessment, emergency preparedness, disaster medicine, pre-post surveys, instructional design, capacity building, thematic analysis, humanitarian aid

The timing and the geography of this launch matter. The editors describe their belief as rooted in cumulative experience gained in a continent and a region they characterize as plagued by both natural and man-made disasters. North Africa, the Middle East, and the wider African continent have contended in recent decades with earthquakes, floods, conflicts, displacement crises, and public health emergencies that place enormous strain on health systems. In such settings, the editors argue, sharing field experience must go hand in hand with rigorous methodology, because anecdote without evidence rarely changes outcomes, and evidence locked behind paywalls rarely reaches the clinicians and officials working in low-resource or crisis-affected environments.

The problem the new journal identifies is a familiar one in global health research: a persistent disconnect between what is published and what is practiced. The founding editorial notes that on a global level, from sudden natural catastrophes to complex humanitarian emergencies, timely and reliable information has repeatedly proven critical, yet researchers, practitioners, and policymakers are often caught by surprise and struggle to access up-to-date findings precisely where the stakes are highest. Disaster-prone and crisis-affected regions frequently lack institutional subscriptions to major journals, meaning that the communities with the most direct experience of mass casualties, infrastructure collapse, and emergency response are often the least able to read the literature about them. The Journal of Emergency and Disaster Medicine is explicitly designed to fill that gap.

Open access sits at the center of that design. The editors state plainly that in many settings where emergencies strike, budgets are tight and institutional subscriptions may be out of reach, so all articles in the journal will be freely accessible to readers worldwide. They frame this as a matter of principle rather than mere convenience, holding that scientific progress and clinical excellence should serve humanity without restriction. The journal is published under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution, and reproduction in any medium or format, provided the original authors and source are credited and changes are indicated. For frontline workers in humanitarian operations, that licensing model means research can be downloaded, printed, translated, and circulated in the field without negotiating copyright barriers in the middle of a crisis.

The journal’s scope is broad by design, reflecting the reality that disaster medicine is not a narrow specialty but a systems-level discipline. The editors invite contributions spanning all dimensions of acute and disaster-related care, including prehospital and emergency department medicine, trauma systems, disaster risk reduction, mass casualty response, humanitarian health services, public health emergencies, and the use of technology and innovation in crisis contexts. That breadth mirrors the way disasters actually unfold: a single earthquake engages ambulance dispatch protocols, emergency department triage, surgical capacity, water and sanitation systems, disease surveillance, and long-term rehabilitation of survivors, all at once. A journal that addresses any one of those domains in isolation risks missing the interdependencies that determine how many people survive.

Notably, the editors are not limiting the journal to conventional research formats. Alongside original research, reviews, and policy analyses, they explicitly encourage field reports and case studies that reflect real-world challenges and innovations. This is a methodologically significant choice. Much of the practical knowledge in disaster response exists as institutional memory in the heads of emergency physicians, logisticians, and humanitarian coordinators, and it often evaporates when operations end. Formalizing a venue for such accounts, subject to the same editorial scrutiny as traditional papers, could help convert hard-won field experience into a reusable, citable body of knowledge. The editors emphasize that their focus is on work that not only advances theoretical knowledge but also produces actionable strategies for preparedness, response, and recovery.

Quality control will rest with an Editorial Board that the editors describe as a body of experts drawn from different corners of the world, a composition intended to position the publication as an efficient tool in the prevention and management of emergencies and disasters. Submitted manuscripts will be evaluated by independent reviewers for originality, methodological soundness, clarity, and relevance, the standard pillars of peer review. The journal’s publication workflow is designed to minimize the delay between acceptance and public availability: once a manuscript is accepted, it will be published online immediately after professional copyediting and typesetting. In a field where outbreak dynamics, aftershocks, and mass casualty events move faster than traditional publication cycles, that speed of dissemination is presented as a core feature rather than an afterthought.

The institutional provenance of the journal adds a distinctive dimension. Kasr Al-Ainy Faculty of Medicine, founded in the nineteenth century, is one of the oldest and largest medical schools in Africa and the Middle East, and Cairo University’s teaching hospital complex functions as a major referral center for Egypt. Its emergency departments absorb an enormous and varied caseload, from road traffic trauma to the aftermath of regional emergencies, giving the institution direct operational familiarity with the challenges the journal addresses. A publication anchored in a high-volume, resource-constrained health system, rather than in a wealthy institution insulated from such pressures, has the potential to set different priorities: questions about triage under scarcity, surge capacity, and supply chain resilience are not hypothetical there.

The launch also arrives amid growing international attention to health emergency preparedness. The COVID-19 pandemic, alongside repeated climate-linked disasters and ongoing conflicts, has exposed weaknesses in how evidence flows to decision-makers during crises, and global frameworks for disaster risk reduction have called for stronger science-to-policy linkages. A journal dedicated to converting evidence into actionable strategies speaks directly to that agenda, and its open-access model lowers the barrier for contributions from researchers in low- and middle-income countries, who are frequently underrepresented in high-impact emergency medicine literature.

The founding editorial closes with an invitation rather than a declaration of arrival. Kassem and Mourad write that they envision the Journal of Emergency and Disaster Medicine becoming a go-to reference for clinicians, researchers, humanitarian professionals, and policymakers committed to saving lives under difficult conditions, and they look forward to submissions, critiques, and shared experience as the venture begins. The editorial, published as Volume 1, article number 1 of the journal, is itself open access, and the first issue will reveal whether the publication can attract the rigorous field research and policy work its founders describe. What is already clear is the editorial wager behind it: that in emergencies and disasters, the distance between evidence and action is measured in lives, and that shortening that distance begins with making the evidence universally available.

Subject of Research: The launch of an open-access journal on emergency and disaster medicine

Article Title: From evidence to action: The launch of the Journal of Emergency and Disaster Medicine by Kasr Al-Ainy Faculty of Medicine, Cairo University

Article References: From evidence to action: The launch of the Journal of Emergency and Disaster Medicine by Kasr Al-Ainy Faculty of Medicine, Cairo University. (n.d.). https://doi.org/10.1007/s44467-025-00005-6

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s44467-025-00005-6

Keywords: emergency medicine, disaster medicine, open access, Cairo University, Kasr Al-Ainy, mass casualty response, humanitarian health, public health emergencies, trauma systems, disaster risk reduction, editorial, Springer Nature