When designing a decision support program for use in coordinating the response to Mass Casualty Incidents, the modelling of the health of casualties presents a significant challenge. In this paper we propose one such health model, capable of acknowledging both the uncertain and dynamic nature of casualty health. Incorporating this into a larger optimisation model capable of use in real-time and...

BACKGROUND To manage the untoward effects of exposure to personally disturbing incidents (PDIs), fire/emergency medical services (EMS) professionals use a variety of coping methods. Some detrimental coping patterns have been steeped in the tradition of emergency services. OBJECTIVE To examine the effectiveness of various coping methods utilized by fire/EMS professionals for mitigating the neg...

acute inpatient status for patients who required a stay of less than 48 hours. But now there is a growing population of patients labeled as facility observation status by payers who still require the resources generally provided by a hospital inpatient unit. These “complex” observation status patients place the hospitals and physicians in an untenable position. Unfortunately, observation has mo...

BACKGROUND The pre-hospital triage process aims at identifying and prioritizing patients in the need of prompt intervention and/or evacuation. The objective of the present study was to evaluate triage decision skills in a Mass Casualty Incident drill. The study compares two groups of participants in Advanced Trauma Life Support and Pre-Hospital Trauma Life Support courses. METHODS A questionn...

In this paper we offer an approach for reasoning about resource allocation and scheduling in multiagent systems that takes into consideration the costs of preempting an agent from its current task. We apply our methodology to the motivating medical application of allocating doctors to patients in hospitals during mass casualty incidents and demonstrate noticeable improvements in performance (ge...

Police traffic enforcement for the prevention of road crashes can be considered in two dimensions: technology and organisation. In recent years in Australia, there has been considerable development in technology, including breath testing apparatus and the speed camera. In parallel with such developments in technology, there are opportunities for further development of the systems of organisatio...

Addressing health disorders at the early stage during mass casualty is one of the important issues to be thrown light nowadays. If mass casualty occurs in remote locations where proper health care equipments or analysis of medical information is not available, a special team must be appointed to monitor and control it. When an emergency occurs, especially in mass casualty incidents, lots of vic...

F ollowing the 9/11 attacks, Congress passed the Terrorism Risk Insurance Act (TRIA) of 2002, which established a temporary federal terrorism-risk insurance program. Th e act provided a system of shared public and private payments for insured commercial property and casualty losses due to acts of terrorism. Congress amended TRIA in 2005 and extended the program at the end of 2007 for seven year...

The UPA (Underwriting Profitability Analysis) application embodies a new approach to mining Property & Casualty (P&C) insurance policy and claims data for the purpose of constructing predictive models for insurance risks. UPA utilizes the ProbE (Probabilistic Estimation) predictive modeling class library to discover risk characterization rules by analyzing large and noisy insurance data sets. E...