Hospitals have long responded to acute multiple-casualty events, which lead to short-lived chaos followed by a more organized medical response and rapid health-system recovery. There has been increasing recognition, though, that events can occur that require a prolonged response for many critically ill patients. These disasters will require a well-coordinated regional and extra-regional medical...

T theme for this year’s supplement, ‘‘Partnering for Preparedness,’’serves notice to the nation regarding the urgency to maintain our investment in combat casualty care research, both to benefit our US military service members and to best prepare our nation on the home front. Department of Defense funding primarily seeks to optimize combat casualty care for US service members injured in conflic...

OBJECTIVE We hypothesized that the number of evacuated casualties from a combat-related multiple casualty event provides an initial baseline estimate of the number of blood products required for the event. METHODS A retrospective review of combat support hospitals' experiences in Operation Iraqi Freedom was performed, (from December 2003 to December 2004). Identified multiple casualty events ...

Handling highly dynamic scenarios as they arise in mass casualty incident (MCI) situations requires lots of information about the situation and an extremely flexible IT infrastructure that can assist in managing the incident. We show a combination of technologies from different fields of research that have focused on the support of the strategic and tactical level in such situations. We describ...

INTRODUCTION St John Ambulance Operations Branch Volunteers have been providing first-aid services at the Royal Adelaide Show for 90 years. The project arose from a need to more accurately predict the workload for first-aid providers at mass gathering events. A formal analysis of workload patterns and the determinants of workload had not been performed. HYPOTHESIS Casualty presentation worklo...