Faculty of Disaster Medicine - India & Nepal

About the Faculty

The Faculty of Disaster Medicine – India and Nepal (FDMIN) is the flagship UK programme established in 2015 in partnership with National Association of Primary Care (NAPC), development support from UK Health Security Agency (formerly Public Health England) and the Pre-Hospital Emergency Care Faculty of the Royal College of Surgeons, Edinburgh. This innovative vision has emerged from over 20 years of investment in humanitarian programmes in India and the sub-continent with focus on health care of badly affected and displaced population from a wide range of disasters.

The concept of disaster medicine as a specialty is relatively new and is very often confused with disaster management, emergency medicine and pre-hospital care via ambulance services. Significant investment of 'Saving Lives' programmes in various disasters and reviews of disaster preparedness and resilience building has shown that the knowledge and expertise of disaster medicine is virtually absent in the majority of low- and middle-income countries.

FDMIN is a pioneering programme developed to build badly needed clinical capacity in disaster medicine for low- and middle-income countries. The programme is funded by 'Saving Lives' charitable donations. Its primary focus is on 'training the trainers' in established medical and healthcare education institutions who will then expand the disaster medicine capacity at various levels appropriate for their country. India and Nepal have been chosen as the pilot for this programme.

Our Vision

To establish a Centre of Excellence for training and continuing professional development for health care professionals and enhance key strengths and competencies for Disaster Medicine & Management for humanitarian needs.

Our Mission

The Faculty for Disaster Medicine – India and Nepal shall be a model for building core capacity for disaster medicine in low- and middle-income countries. The primary focus will be to build national capacity for disaster medicine by training the trainers and offering flexible modular courses for professional development to health care professionals through recognised education and training institutions and universities.

Programme

Disaster Medicine programme for India & Nepal is a niche programme for 'training the trainers' consisting of 16 modules. The programme is designed to enable various healthcare teaching institutions and universities of low- and middle-income countries to:

1. Develop core clinical capacity for disaster medicine at various levels of the healthcare system.
2. Develop essential skills across the healthcare spectrum based on available resources.
3. Enable research and publish case studies for learning and improving medical and healthcare impacts from a range of diverse regular disasters.
4. Improve disaster management plans by including essential disaster medicine planning, preparedness, response and recovery.
5. Strengthen the country's healthcare system with focus on population health and primary care, public health, pre-hospital & emergency care and global health security.

Core objective

The core objective of the Faculty is to build clinical capacity for 'Disaster Medicine.'

Delivery

The development of clinical capacity building shall be a 'multi-stream' programme approach with credit accumulation from training providers. FDMIN has MoU with the partner institutes in India and Nepal to develop teaching and training in disaster medicine, delivering 'fit for purpose' training programmes at different levels appropriate for the region.