Medical threat assessment models

Since 2001, the Swedish Armed Forces (SwAF) in collaboration with the Swedish Defence Research Agency (FOI) has produced pre-deployment medical threat assessments for the majority of SwAF international deployments. The work has been utilized by deploying organizations, not only in Sweden, but also by international actors. However, within the ongoing internal quality process in the SwAF/FOI working group, the potential need for revision and/ or new development of the threat model currently used as well as further harmonization with risk assessment models and other international methodologies have been discussed. An increasing demand for interoperability between multinational deploying forces has elucidated the need for some degree of comparability between health risk assessment models of different nations. To date, these distinctions and needs have not been made clear in the SwAF/FOI assessments. For this reason, a need for a more systematic and reproducible methodology was identified, based on international accepted key parameters common for medical assessment models for SwAF relevant deployments. This report details our investigation of selected international health threat assessment models and discusses whether the identified need for improvements of the Swedish model could be found in existing international threat and risk assessment methodology, or if there is a need for a deeper focus on development of a completely new health threat assessment model.