Expert Consensus on Disaster Medical Rescue Services

Disasters and disaster rescue are accompanied by the development of human history. But disaster medicine has been a discipline only for several decades recently. The establishment of the disaster rescue system in China began with the outbreak of SARS in 2003. As the incident exposed a series of problems in response to emerging infectious diseases, China began to consider how to systematically respond to various disasters and commence establishing a comprehensive emergency management system. The “Emergency Response Law of the People’s Republic of China” implemented in 2007 marks the preliminary establishment of China’s modern disaster rescue system. In December 2011, the Disaster Medicine Branch of Chinese Medical Association was established in Shanghai, marking a new stage of the development of disaster medicine in China. Here, disaster medicine and medical rescue services were summarized to guide the implementation of related work.