The National Disaster Medical System (NDMS) is a section of the United States Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) responsible for managing Federal government's medical response to major emergencies and disasters. The overall purpose of the NDMS is to supplement an integrated National medical response capability for assisting State and local authorities in dealing with the medical impacts of major peacetime disasters and to provide support to the military and the Department of Veterans Affairs medical systems in caring for casualties evacuated back to the U.S. from overseas armed conventional conflicts.
NDMS’s federal partners include the Federal Emergency Management Agency, Department of Defense (DOD), and the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA). NDMS also interfaces with state and local Departments of Health, as well as private hospitals. (Note: NDMS was returned to DHHS (US Department of Health and Human Services) on January 1, 2007 by an Act of Congress).
Read more about National Disaster Medical System: Organization, Operations
Famous quotes containing the words national, disaster, medical and/or system:
“As one digs deeper into the national character of the Americans, one sees that they have sought the value of everything in this world only in the answer to this single question: how much money will it bring in?”
—Alexis de Tocqueville (1805–1859)
“The appropriation of radical thinking by lazy, self-obsessed hippies is a public relations disaster that could cost the earth.”
—Ben Elton (b. 1959)
“If science ever gets to the bottom of Voodoo in Haiti and Africa, it will be found that some important medical secrets, still unknown to medical science, give it its power, rather than the gestures of ceremony.”
—Zora Neale Hurston (1891–1960)
“The individual protests against the world, but he doesn’t get beyond protest, he is just a single protester. When he wants to be more than that, he has to counter power with power, he has to oppose the system with another system.”
—Friedrich Dürrenmatt (1921–1990)