THE DUTCH APPROACH IN DISASTER VICTIM IDENTIFICATION

Abstract

A disaster is a ‘sudden calamitous event that seriously disrupts the functioning of a
community or society and causes human, material and economic or environmental
losses that exceed the community’s or society’s ability to cope using its own resources’.
Often disasters coincide with the loss of numerous lives. The recovery, identification
and repatriation of the (remains of the) victims is vital to the mourning process of the
relatives and is needed for legal clearing. All efforts made for this purpose are referred
to as Disaster Victim Identification (DVI). Over the past decades, the Dutch DVI team
has made several contributions to increase the efficiency of the internationally accepted
Interpol DVI-procedures. This article presents, from a medical officer’s point of view,
the basics of a disaster victim identification response and discusses some of the recent
methodological advances used by the Dutch DVI team.