Have you ever wondered how hospitals cope when there is a disaster? Griffith University’s Associate Professor Jamie Ranse is helping health services ensure policy, planning and practices can cope and respond effectively when disasters occur.

A/Prof Ranse’s research influences health policy and procedures, ensuring that health services use evidence to change policies and procedures to help communities affected by major disasters. He investigates how events such as mass gatherings, major events, public health emergencies and disasters disrupt health systems.

Increases in the frequency and severity of disasters change the ways affected communities function and stresses an already stretch health system.

“Our health system is stressed and we’re developing evidence about these extra things that happen to make sure it’s strengthened during those times,” he said.

A/Prof works closely with key health stakeholders including local hospitals, health service providers, and the State Health Disaster Management Unit to ensure his research flows through to the development of policy and updating of practices.

“I try to disseminate my work as far as possible and hope to some degree that someone down the chain will go oh, this looks really interesting, I want to talk to Jamie about his thoughts, about how we could do things differently and that’s how then I start engagement with a lot of health services around the ways in which they could be doing things differently or thinking about different things,” he said.

Developing a better understanding of disruptive events means that appropriate strategies can be devised to strengthen health systems so that when these events occur it is possible to maintain as close to the normal operational capacity of health services.

“What happens if you have a flood which means that health workers can’t get to work and therefore you have less workforce?” A/Prof said.

“What happens if you have a chemical or biological incident where a hospital might receive 20 patients who are critically unwell at the same time? The current flow of patients is somewhat predictable. We know which are busy days. We know which are busy shifts. We can somewhat predict that stuff.”


“So when these bigger incidents occur, it’s like, well, how do we change our normal operational capacity to disaster response or assistance capacity? What systems do we put in place to do that now?”

A/Prof Ranse said that evidence informed policy and practice in disaster health management had only emerged in the past couple of decades with key events such as the Bali bombings, the Indian Ocean Tsunami and the Canberra bushfires prompting a change in how events that placed enormous stress on the health system were managed.

A/Prof Ranse also researches mass gatherings.

He is a global expert for the World Health Organization, and works with WHO to develop risk assessments and guidance around major events, health and COVID-19.

During the COVID-19 pandemic he led the Queensland Industry Framework for COVID Safe Events.

“So essentially any event which was being held during COVID needed to abide by that particular framework, which was legislated for event organisers,” he said.

A/Prof Ranse led the establishment of the Mass Gathering Collaboration at Griffith University which focuses on health and events.

“This is more focused on the health and well-being of communities and the people that attend the events,”
he said.

The collaboration brings together people from various levels of government, health services, hospitals, public health units, event organisers and other people across Australia who have expertise in this space to provide strategic advice.

A/Prof Ranse hopes the collaboration will soon expand to the Western Pacific region with the sharing of lessons from the Australian context about staging major events from a health perspective.

He is driven to make a difference because of his experiences as a teenager volunteering for the St John’s Ambulance Service at sporting events.

“There was an elderly lady at one of these events who had a cardiac arrest, so I was one of the first people responding and participating in that cardiac arrest response.

“Unfortunately, she subsequently passed away that day, but it got me thinking about events, how do we do this? Is there a better way to do this?”

This led him to a career in emergency nursing, including being part of the response to the 2003 Canberra bushfires which led him to question how health systems could be improved to support health workers and patients.

You can read more about A/Prof Ranse’s research at http://www.jamieranse.com/

You can visit the Mass Gathering Collaboration site at https://massgatherings.com.au/