4.B: Evaluate statistics in the article. Assess whether causal relationship is demonstrated.

Emergency Planning
Student’s Name
Institutional Affiliation

Casual Relationship
The article, “where is the evidence for emergency planning: a scoping review,” by Christy Challen, Andrew Lee, Andrew Booth, Paolo Gardoi, Hellen Bucley Woods and Steve Goodacre indicates that there is a relationship between emergency planning and the mortality or morbidity that occurs in the event of a casualty incident. The scope review also indicates that there is a causal relationship between available literature on past incidents and the emergency planning measures. Although literature exists on previous incidents, there is little evidence that it has been exploited in emergency planning.
From the scope review, there was disproportionate literature that relates to health emergency planning. A lot of literature exists on disasters in high-income countries such as Canada and the US. Conversely, regions such as Europe had little literature on emergency planning despite having a high number of reported emergency incidents. However, there is no indication in the article that the available literature influenced emergency planning in the respective regions.
Additionally, the generalization and lack of clarity in the literature relating to emergency response have contributed to the literature’s inability to influence emergency planning policy and practice. There is particularly, lack of evidence of the impact of existing literature on the mitigation and recovery process (Challen et al., 2012). For Literature to be effective in influencing emergency planning, it must provide solutions that are practical.

The gaps and weaknesses of the literature make it difficult to affect emergency planning.
In conclusion, the scope review in the article discussed in this paper reveal gaps in the existing literature. These gaps have hindered the influence of available information on emergency planning policy and practice. Consequently, there is no evidence that existing literature has had an impact on emergency planning. Therefore, there is no causal relationship between the available statistics and emergency planning mechanisms.

Reference
Challen, K., Lee, A. C., Booth, A., Gardois, P., Woods, H. B., & Goodacre, S. W. (2012). Where is the evidence for emergency planning: a scoping review. BMC Public Health, 12(1). doi:10.1186/1471-2458-12-542