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Systematic reporting to improve the emergency medical response to major incidents: a pilot study

BACKGROUND: Major incidents affect us globally, and are occurring with increasing frequency. There is still no evidence-based standard regarding the best medical emergency response to major incidents. Currently, reports on major incidents are non-standardised and variable in quality. This pilot stud...

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Autores principales: Sophie, Hardy, Sabina, Fattah, Torben, Wisborg, Lasse, Raatiniemi, Trine, Staff, Marius, Rehn
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: BioMed Central 2018
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5784690/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29368642
http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s12873-018-0153-x
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author Sophie, Hardy
Sabina, Fattah
Torben, Wisborg
Lasse, Raatiniemi
Trine, Staff
Marius, Rehn
author_facet Sophie, Hardy
Sabina, Fattah
Torben, Wisborg
Lasse, Raatiniemi
Trine, Staff
Marius, Rehn
author_sort Sophie, Hardy
collection PubMed
description BACKGROUND: Major incidents affect us globally, and are occurring with increasing frequency. There is still no evidence-based standard regarding the best medical emergency response to major incidents. Currently, reports on major incidents are non-standardised and variable in quality. This pilot study examines the first systematic reports from a consensus-based, freely accessible database, aiming to identify how descriptive analysis of reports submitted to this database can be used to improve the major incident response. METHODS: Majorincidentreporting.net is a website collecting reports on major incidents using a standardised template. Data from these reports were analysed to compare the emergency response to each incident. RESULTS: Data from eight reports showed that effective triage by experienced individuals and the use of volunteers for transport were notable successes of the major incident response. Inadequate resources, lack of a common triage system, confusion over command and control and failure of communication were reported failures. The following trends were identified: Fires had the slowest times for several aspects of the response and the only three countries to have a single dialling number for all three emergency services had faster response times. Helicopter Emergency Medical services (HEMS) were used for transport and treatment in rural locations and for triage and treatment in urban locations. In two incidents, a major incident was declared before the arrival of the first Emergency Medical Services (EMS) personnel. CONCLUSION: This study shows that we can obtain relevant data from major incidents by using systematic reporting. Though the sample size from this pilot study is not large enough to draw any specific conclusions it illustrates the potential for future analyses. Identified lessons could be used to improve the emergency medical response to major incidents.
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spelling pubmed-57846902018-02-07 Systematic reporting to improve the emergency medical response to major incidents: a pilot study Sophie, Hardy Sabina, Fattah Torben, Wisborg Lasse, Raatiniemi Trine, Staff Marius, Rehn BMC Emerg Med Research Article BACKGROUND: Major incidents affect us globally, and are occurring with increasing frequency. There is still no evidence-based standard regarding the best medical emergency response to major incidents. Currently, reports on major incidents are non-standardised and variable in quality. This pilot study examines the first systematic reports from a consensus-based, freely accessible database, aiming to identify how descriptive analysis of reports submitted to this database can be used to improve the major incident response. METHODS: Majorincidentreporting.net is a website collecting reports on major incidents using a standardised template. Data from these reports were analysed to compare the emergency response to each incident. RESULTS: Data from eight reports showed that effective triage by experienced individuals and the use of volunteers for transport were notable successes of the major incident response. Inadequate resources, lack of a common triage system, confusion over command and control and failure of communication were reported failures. The following trends were identified: Fires had the slowest times for several aspects of the response and the only three countries to have a single dialling number for all three emergency services had faster response times. Helicopter Emergency Medical services (HEMS) were used for transport and treatment in rural locations and for triage and treatment in urban locations. In two incidents, a major incident was declared before the arrival of the first Emergency Medical Services (EMS) personnel. CONCLUSION: This study shows that we can obtain relevant data from major incidents by using systematic reporting. Though the sample size from this pilot study is not large enough to draw any specific conclusions it illustrates the potential for future analyses. Identified lessons could be used to improve the emergency medical response to major incidents. BioMed Central 2018-01-24 /pmc/articles/PMC5784690/ /pubmed/29368642 http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s12873-018-0153-x Text en © The Author(s). 2018 Open AccessThis article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated.
spellingShingle Research Article
Sophie, Hardy
Sabina, Fattah
Torben, Wisborg
Lasse, Raatiniemi
Trine, Staff
Marius, Rehn
Systematic reporting to improve the emergency medical response to major incidents: a pilot study
title Systematic reporting to improve the emergency medical response to major incidents: a pilot study
title_full Systematic reporting to improve the emergency medical response to major incidents: a pilot study
title_fullStr Systematic reporting to improve the emergency medical response to major incidents: a pilot study
title_full_unstemmed Systematic reporting to improve the emergency medical response to major incidents: a pilot study
title_short Systematic reporting to improve the emergency medical response to major incidents: a pilot study
title_sort systematic reporting to improve the emergency medical response to major incidents: a pilot study
topic Research Article
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5784690/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29368642
http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s12873-018-0153-x
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