To the Editor: The South African public health sector follows a hierarchical referral system. District hospitals play a central role between the primary health care (PHC) clinics, community health centres (CHCs), regional and tertiary hospitals. They provide level one (generalist) services to in-and outpatients referred from PHC clinics and CHCs. District hospitals should ensure that patients a...

BACKGROUND A lack of authentic learning opportunities influence the quality of emergency training of nursing students. The purpose of this article is to describe how the step-up action research model was used to improve the quality of trauma-related educational practice of undergraduate nursing students. OBJECTIVES To reduce deaths caused by trauma, healthcare workers should be competent to p...

Mass casualty incidents (MCI) are characterized by a large number of victims with respect to the resources available. In this study, we aimed to analyze the changes produced in the self-perception of students who were able to visualize aerial views of a simulation of a MCI. A simulation study, mixed method, was performed to compare the results from an ad hoc questionnaire. The 35 students from ...

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. Normally, rescue workers from different organisational cultures do not communicate across their organisational boundaries, but in an MCI they have to efficiently collabora...

For some time now, it has been recognised that a major shift is occurring in the population age distributions of most motorised countries resulting in a growing number of older persons with an increasing need for mobility. It is expected that the mobility of older persons will become even more reliant on the motor vehicle as European countries in particular undergo transitions towards decentral...

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 ...

BACKGROUND User reported experiences and satisfaction are increasingly used as basis for quality indicators in the health sector. However, there is limited understanding of factors associated with user reported experiences and satisfaction with casualty clinics. METHODS A random sample of 542 patients that had contacted any of three casualty clinics from mid April to mid May 2008 was mailed a...