Episode Details

Date: April 21, 2026 Lauren Openshaw Guest Skeptic: Lauren Openshaw is a medical student at the George Washington University School of Medicine & Health Sciences, Class of 2027, where she is a part of the Disaster Medicine Scholarly Concentration. Her clinical interests include pediatrics, disaster medicine, critical care, and emergency preparedness, particularly as they relate to protecting vulnerable children during natural disasters and public health crises. Background:  Floods, fires, hurricanes, blizzards, cyberattacks, hospital surges, the list goes on. Disasters are no longer just movie events or rare abstractions. These are real-world events that disrupt and change how we care for patients and families. We spend a lot of time in training learning how to manage sepsis, trauma, asthma, etc. But disaster medicine? For many learners and clinicians, that part of the curriculum is thin, fragmented, or missing entirely.  Not every medical school has a disaster medicine concentration. There is typically very minimal formal teaching around disasters, if any, in the medical school curriculum. Today, we’d like to introduce our audience to a new Free Open Access to Medical Education (FOAMed) resource, the Disaster Medicine Handbook, which we like to call the front door to disaster medicine. Tune in to the podcast to hear Lauren's perspective on this resource and how she's used and contributed to it. The Gap Let’s start with the basic question: why create something like this at all? Many trainees, nurses, Emergency Medical Services (EMS) clinicians, and even attending physicians may have heard of terms like surge capacity, incident command, crisis standards of care, evacuation, decontamination, and major incident triage. We know these things matter, and they affect children, families, hospitals, and communities.  However, there's often no good starting point in disaster medicine for students, residents, or other learners. That’s the space the Disaster Medicine Handbook is trying to fill. It was built for the person who is curious, motivated, maybe a little intimidated, and looking for a place to begin. It depicts key topics in disaster medicine in a friendly, digestible format that also incorporates a pediatric lens.  That idea of an entry point is really important. This is not trying to replace formal disaster training, advanced courses, or deeper reference material. It’s trying to do something else: help someone say, “Okay, now I finally understand the basics in words that make sense.”  Plain Language One of the things we like most about many existing FOAMed resources and what we’ve adopted for the Handbook is that it starts from a very simple premise: explain disaster medicine in normal words.  Disaster medicine is full of technical language, acronyms, frameworks, and systems terminology. That can be useful once you’re in the field, but it can also become a barrier for people who are just trying to understand the fundamentals. We love this quote attributed to Einstein, “Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.” That’s the balance we try to strike. We recognize that disaster medicine, with its various frameworks and systems, is complex. Our goal is to make it more understandable and accessible.  We want it to pique interest and give people that “aha” moment that unlocks a complicated concept, leaving them curious to learn more. Which is why we have references and resources to further material.  Bite-Size, Choose-Your-Own-Adventure  These are bite-sized chapters. Short, focused, digestible pieces that you can read in one sitting.  After a busy clinical day, it’s hard to sit down and read a giant textbook chapter or digest a dense academic article. We often try to learn between other tasks or during parts of our day, before a conference, on our commute, or during a quiet moment in the department. Maybe even in the ten minutes after seeing something pop up in the news,