The use of arterial tourniquets in prehospital emergency care has been fraught with controversy and superstition for many years despite the potential utility of these tools. This review examines this controversy in the context of the history of the tourniquet as well as its recent use in surgery and modern battlefield casualty care. Safe prehospital tourniquet use is widespread in the military ...

We aimed to determine the scientific framework for research on disaster and mass casualty incident (MCI) in Korea, especially Korean terminology, feasible definition, and epidemiologic indices. The two staged policy Delphi method was performed by instructors of National Disaster Life Support (NDLS®) with the constructed questionnaire containing items based on the literature review. The first-st...

OBJECTIVE Over the last century, the number of disasters has increased. Many governments and scientific institutions agree that disaster medicine education should be included in the standard medical curriculum. Italian medical students' perceptions of mass casualty incidents and disasters and whether-and if so to what extent-such topics are part of their academic program were investigated. DE...

This report describes the initial hospital and burn center management of a mass casualty incident resulting from an aircraft crash and fire. One hundred thirty soldiers were injured, including 10 immediate fatalities. Womack Army Medical Center at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, managed the casualties and began receiving patients 15 minutes after the crash. As a result of repetitive training that i...

Emergency medical services (EMS) provide pre-hospital medical care and represent an important part of the rescue chain. The paramedic and physician’s work is characterized by regular day-to-day services as well as extraordinary missions within mass casualty incidents (MCIs). For several reasons, accessing, recording and communicating operational data are important tasks in any scenario of urgen...

STUDY OBJECTIVES To describe the incidence and epidemiology of major incidents occurring in Britain over the past 28 years. METHODS Major incidents were identified through a MEDLINE search, a hand search of journals and government reports at the Home Office Emergency Planning College, newspaper reports, a postal survey of ambulance emergency planning officers, and through requests for informa...

OBJECTIVE The purpose of this study was to ascertain whether school-based emergency medical services (EMS) incidents are different from nonschool-based EMS incidents for school-aged children. METHODS We examined South Dakota EMS incident reports involving children ages 5 to 18 years old from 1994 through 1996 (n = 12603). Patient characteristics, dispatch reason, primary medical complaint, in...