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The policy applies to U.S. state and local first responders to incidents.

1. There is also a need for further assessment of the impact of violence, both on facilities and organizations, and also on populations served. These knowledge gaps have serious implications for the way the drivers of violence are understood and, by extension, the ability of organizations operating in complex security environments ability to effectively manage the security of their staff and facilities in order to deliver healthcare.

2. Within medical anthropology and sociology, violence is seen a social phenomenon that is culturally structured and interpreted, and the human body can serve as a site of contestation, where various types of power relations play out at individual-, community-, state- and global-level levels.

3. In the same vein, training among health workers and patients in complex security about the importance of reporting attacks and different reporting fora may reduce the number of incidents that go unreported and the accuracy and completeness of those which are reported.

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)

The argument is suppored by interviews with organization representatives, data reported by NGOs and other parties (like the MSF), and review of current literature on violence affecting health service delivery. 

The policy is to extend Good Samaritan laws to first responders so that they would not be liable for "spreading contamination while attempting to save lives."

The article's main points cover the major challenges impeding research studies on violence that affects health service delivery in "complex security environments". The problem isn't lack of data regarding violence affecting health service delivery, but the lack of "health specific" and "gender-disaggregated" data, or data that's not completely tied to humanitarian aid.

The authors suggest several ways to increase research: increased collaboration between academia, NGO's, and health service organizations, inserting a research component in aid operations, and increasing funding to academic and aid organizations.

The policy addresses the immediate dangers to public health (weapons of mass destruction/ hazmat incidents) and the environmental hazards that may come from first responders attempting to decontaminate victims. 

The policy was created in in 1999 after concerns brought up by the Team Leader of the Chemical Weapons Improved Response Team (CWIRT), U.S. Army Soldier and Biological Chemical Command over whether first responders to WMD (weapons of mass destruction) incidents were liable for pollution and other environmental consequences of their decontamination/ life-saving efforts.

Violence against health care workers is the subject of the article so emergency medical response is addressed directly, but mostly within the context of humanitarian aid.