In 2011, the Minnesota Legislature passed and Governor Dayton signed SF 119, creating a new certification for Community Paramedics. The law included language directing the Department of Human Services to create this report.
The stakeholders discribed in the film was the general population of Liberia. They had shared experiances of seeing the effects of ebola, innitially being in denial of its severity, then finally seeing the entire liberian public health system be overwhelmed and fail by an apparently unstopable and horrifying disease. The people effected needed to make difficult decisions about how to avoid contracting the disease, how to protect their families, and how to deal with the emotional strain placed on them by the epidemic.
From the information provided and resources available I was unable to determing if this report has been used elsewhere.
Perspectives of public health officials, goverment workers (excluding the president), and international aid organizations such as doctors with out borders and the united nations (both of which are depicted), are not included in the film. More scholarly perspectives are also not included.
This is a legislative report produced by Department of Human Services following up on SF 119, an act creating a new certification for Community Paramedics.
This film is designed to have an emotional appeal. Very little scientific evidance is provided, and most of what we see are images and naratives about the effects of ebola from the public's perspective. Powerful images and stories, such as the death of a pregnant women on the side of the road, the closing of hospitals, and the turning away of patients are predominantly displayed. Much of this movie is told from the perspective of a student of the University of Wisconsin, and there was a large amount of dialouge about how he tried to get his family out of the effected zone. The only notable statistics given in the film was at the end, when the number of effected and the number of deaths were compared.
This report has a massive implication for technical professionals in the medical field, creating an entirely new certification for health care practitioners to hold and work with.
I feel that this film would be best suited for a general public, non-scholarly, audiance. While it provides great, compelling, emotional stories of first hand accounts of ebola, it does not look at the disaster from an objective, scholarly, perspective.
This report was published by the Minnesota Department of Human Services.
The main arguement of the film is that the development of stable and adequite public health networks is as important to the greater good of the population as the prevention of civil war.