Communication and information are cornerstones of management during major incidents and disasters. To support medical command and control, the Web-based support system called Paratus Major Incident can be used. The Paratus Major Incident system can provide management staff with online information from the incident area, and support management and patient handling at both single and mass-casualty incidents. The purpose of the Web-based information technology (IT) system is to ensure communication and information between the medical management at the scene, hospital management, and regional medical command and control (gold level).

In the region of Östergötland, Sweden, Paratus Major Incident system is used in operating topics such as: (1) information dissemination from the incident area; (2) communication between prehospital, regional, and hospital management; (3) continuous updates between the dispatch centre and medical commanders at all levels; (4) digital log-files for medical management and patient records; (4) database used for follow-up studies and quality control.

During 2,161 incidents, 746 “first incident reports” from ambulance on scene were sent to regional medical command and control within 2 minutes. Four hundred and fifty-six “verification reports” were sent within 10 minutes. During 15 incidents, the designated duty officer on regional level confirmed “major incident” directly via the digital system, thereby notifying all arriving ambulance resources and involved medical managements.

This Web-based IT system successfully has been used daily within prehospital management since 2005. The system includes medical command and control at the regional level and all involved hospitals in a major incident.

People using public transportation have to put their health and even their lives in the hands of personnel authorized to drive the vehicles. But, organizers are taking unprecedented measures to protect transportation from diverse threats. However, there is often overwhelming evidence of the weak effectiveness of pertinent measures.

There is a permanent threat of possible physical and/or psychological impact on persons authorized as drivers, which leads to a possible threat to the health and lives of others. Such events can be divided into two groups: (1) pre-driving; and (2) in-driving. Anthropogenic impacts while pre-driving and in-driving periods stimulate feelings of fear, which comprises different components.

In the pre-driving group, drivers face overwhelming mental health impacts. This includes fear for their lives and health, fear of responsibility for family, friends, and passengers. In the in-driving group, the variation of physical and mental impacts determines the addition of fears of other categories.

Integrated sensors for measuring levels of blood pressure, sweating, heart rate, respiratory rate, and changes in the retina of the eye should be implemented. This hardware and software should process information about drivers. They would provide instant alerts on changes in the indicators.

Certain disposable items such as Percutaneous Tracheostomy (PT) sets and intracranial pressure (ICP) monitoring sets are expensive and a major drain on resources of public funded hospitals.

To assess the use and cost-effectiveness of reusing expensive disposables (PT& ICP sensor) in a neurosurgery intensive care unit (ICU). Another objective was to assess the importance of bedside Tracheostomy and ICP insertion in an ICU rather than in OT.

An observational, retro-prospective study was done from January 2008 to November 2010 in the neurosurgical department of JPN Apex Trauma Center. Retrospective data on surgeries performed in Neurosurgery OT were taken for the year 2008 and following introduction of PT and bedside ICP monitoring sets in ICU, prospective data were collected from November 2009 in the neurosurgery ICU. Each set was tagged according to number of times used. A procedure book was maintained, in which each case along with the set used was mentioned.

Of the 1209 surgeries performed in the neurosurgical OT in 2008–2009, 257 were minor procedures (238 open tracheostomy and 19 ICP transducer placements). In 2009–10, 236 percutaneous tracheostomies were performed in the ICU. Of these, 79 (33.4%) were new and 157 (66.5%) were re-used sets. The cost of a new PT set is Rs 15,000. With re-use, the average price per set came down to Rs 5,033. In the same period, 231 disposable ICP transducers were placed with an average of 19 cases per month (range 5–28). Of these, 142 (61%) were new ICP sets and 97 (42%) were ethylene oxide (ETO) sterilized. The cost of new ICP set is Rs 35,000. With re-use, the average price per set came down to Rs 21,515.

Nearly 40% of minor procedures are now excluded from the Neurosurgery OT statistics, as they are being performed in the ICU. This study shows that expensive disposable items can be re-used effectively, bringing immense cost savings to hospitals.

According to the Belgian Hospital Disaster Planning Act, all hospitals are required to have written disaster plans and to routinely conduct annual disaster drills. In 2010, the management of the Military Hospital decided to organize an evacuation exercise of the newly built 24-bed BU.

To evaluate this new BU's evacuation plan and drills and the overall hospital emergency incident response and command system.

It was decided to conduct a simulated evacuation exercise following an internal fire, before the BU effectively was put into use, thereby deploying fashioned simulated patients and visitors but bringing into action the regular attending medical, nursing and logistic staff. A multidisciplinary design and organizing team was launched, consisting of the hospitals disaster preparedness coordinator, the EMS-staff, external burn care, emergency incident management and operational engineering experts. The appointed objectives for evaluation were the knowledge of the regular evacuation drills, especially the clearance of an intensive care room; access to evacuation routes; visibility of safety guidelines; mission and tasks of the hospital's first response team and the medical incident manager; communication and information flow and the establishment of the hospital's coordination committee. In the mean time and following lessons learned, a number of mitigation measures have been instituted: adequate identification of evacuated rooms, new configuration of the fire detection alarm, optimized access to stairwells and elevators, adjustment of action cards and specific fire fighting training for hospital staff. Finally the decision was made not to purchase specific evacuation equipment for the movement of patients.

Taking advantage of the BU's provisional vacancy, a simulated hospital evacuation exercise increased the hospital emergency preparedness, awareness and response to disasters within the hospital, in particular in a critical care department, otherwise difficult to assess.

Mass casualty incidents (MCIs), requiring Trauma critical care, are increasingly likely. The ability to scale operations up i.e. ‘surge capacity’, is vital for ensuring scarce resources are used efficiently. The number of intensive care unit (ICU) beds is one of the key resources and indicators of a hospital's capacity and thus a vital area to target when assessing a systems ability to surge its Trauma ICU capabilities.

The study attempted to assess whether ICU facilities at major hospitals in large Australian cities would be able to respond to an event on the magnitude of the Madrid tragedy. This is the first report to measure Australia's major hospitals intensive care trauma surge capacity using Madrid as a standard.

In this prospective, cross-sectional analysis, we conducted a survey of major urban ICU trauma centres in the 8 state and Territory Capital cities of Australia. 14 Trauma Centre ICU's were targeted. The study was composed of two parts, A & B. Part A of the study consisted of an online survey, Part B, consisted of a follow-up telephone questionnaire. Full Ethics approval was sought and obtained.

There were 8 replies to the survey giving a 57% participation rate. At the time of this snap-shot survey the total number of Physically available ICU beds throughout the 8 Level I trauma centres was 52.5. All hospitals had at least 3 spare beds. This ranged from 3 to 10 beds. After accounting for the flux in beds post admissions & discharges there was a 21% increase in bed availability, which was further increased by a magnitude of 28% to an average of 10.125 beds, if all elective surgical procedures were cancelled. When using the Madrid ICU surge (29 new ICU patients) as a gold standard against which to compare, it was found the largest trauma ICU in Australia could have managed 62% of this surge. On average the 8 trauma centres would have handled only 34.75% of the Madrid ICU surge.

In the event of a major traumatic disaster on the scale of the Madrid atrocity, few if any of Australia's major trauma centres have the capacity to cope with the requisite surge. More research and novel ways of addressing this challenge are needed.

The recent H1N1 pandemic presented severe challenges to many emergency departments (ED). At our institution it caused overcapacity issues with increasing length of stay and increasing patients leaving before treatment. The emergency department space at the hospital was already fully used including hallway beds. Other clinical space could not be taken for ED expansion, as it was also all maximally used.

Portable mobile ED expansion modules were developed consisting of ED supply carts, pharmacy items and a wireless ED information system (EDIS) integrated with computers on wheels. This EDIS provided internet access from anywhere in the hospital, enabling access to clinical databases, order entry for testing, medications and discharge instructions, providing full operability of ED functions. This complete assembly can be stored in a small storage area. The H1N1 pandemic allowed for practical testing of this system. This system was deployed to a nearby hospital clinic that closed at 5 pm. The expansion module operated from 6pm to 10pm staffed with two providers. Data was compared between days when the surge clinic was in operation and days it was not. Data was collected on patients seen and left without being seen rates.

During the trial period of 9 days, 1323 patients were seen in the ED and 112 were seen in the modular clinic setting, representing 8.5% of the total ED volume. No technical problems were noted and the system worked as designed. We observed increased satisfaction from both staff and patients. No reduction in the number of patients leaving without treatment was noted in either group (5/day).

A modular portable ED expansion setup is practical and may increase ED capacity at times of maximal patient volumes. These materials are easily storable and build surge capacity for other events.

On the night of 06 December 2007, an explosion occurred at a steelworks plant in the city of Turin. The incident involved 10 people. The emergency medical services (EMS 118 Turin) declared a mass-casualty incident (MCI).

The aim of this case report is to analyze the response of the EMS 118 Turin to the MCI in order to identify problems or short-comings and improve the service for future responses.

Information from the dispatch center, medical report of the EMS, and hospitals that received the patients were analyzed.

The emergency call was placed at 01:04 hours, and the MCI was declared closed at 04:40 hours. The disaster, in according to Disaster Severity Scale (DSS), was classified 3. The METHANE message was sent to the dispatch center by the first ambulance 4 minutes after the call. There were 10 patients: seven T1; one T2; and two T3. The dispatch center deployed nine teams, which consisted of five advanced life support (ALS) teams and four basic life support (BLS) teams. All of the casualties were able to walk when they arrived to the medical care. The T1 casualties had burns to > 80% of their body surface area (BSA), the T2 and T1 casualties suffered inhalation of smoke gas. The first casualties were evacuated to the hospital 28 minutes after the call. Four casualties (three T1 and one T3) were transported to the nearest hospital. the other four T1 casualties were transported to four different hospitals of the city. All the T1 casualties died in the next 24 days.

The management of resources during this MCI was suboptimal. The number of ALS teams that responded to the MCI was high considering the number of casualties and the time taken to resolve the incident. The lessons learned from this incident and other cases have permitted the EMS Turin to improve their response plan concerning the use of resources and surge capacity.

Effective function of the community care system is important during a pandemic. Self-protective behavior might help stop the spread of the disease during a pandemic and prevent system dysfunction because of personnel morbidity.

To compare the immunization rate and reported self-protective behavior of healthcare workers between hospitals and community care clinics during the peak of the winter A/H1N1 pandemic in Israel.

A questionnaire was completed by 1,147 healthcare workers in 21 hospitals and 40 primary care clinics in Israel between 26 November 2009 and 10 December 2009 (the peak of the winter A/H1N1 flu outbreak).

The rate of vaccination against A/H1N1 among hospital workers (27.9%) was significantly higher compared with primary care clinics workers (19.3%) (OR = 0.691 (0.821–0.582)).

In a hypothetical situation, an emergency services team is launched to treat a man who collapsed in the street. The team finds John Doe's mobile phone, and within seconds retrieves the required clinical parameters from his Mobile Medical Record (MMR), thus, providing a life-saving treatment suited to his personal health condition. This study seeks to determine if the necessary clinical parameters, required at emergency situations have ever been examined in order to best match both emergency situations and cellular technology.

To characterize the clinical parameters that make up an MMR in the context of saving lives, and to propose a model for an MMR in emergency medicine.

The essential emergency medicine clinical parameters in the context of life-saving treatments were characterized through interviews with prehospital and hospital experts in emergency medicine. The results were analyzed with the help of a cellular multimedia expert in order to best incorporate the clinical parameters into cellular phones as MMRs.

Emergency medicine teams chose individual and specific clinical parameters in a certain order of appearance from the general medical record that should assembly, in their opinion, an emergency medicine MMR. A MMR was chosen by the emergency medicine treatment teams as one of their preferred communication methods. The MMR model, if applied correctly, will provide the emergency medicine treatment teams an available, reliable, homogeneous database of real time clinical parameters adapted to life-saving conditions. The MMR model represents a conceptual revolution of taking the medical record from the caregiver and transferring it to the patient, which can be constantly at hand at any given time or place in their mobile phones.

In Germany, emergency physicians in the prehospital rescue system ensure primary care. The rescue helicopter in Dresden covers the city of Dresden (population 517,000), surrounding areas with distances up to 70 km. Typical reasons for alerting the rescue helicopter are heart diseases or injuries during accidents. There also is a high number of patients with attempted or completed suicides. The goal of the study was to analyze cases associated with suicide.

Data of all emergency transports from the German Air Rescue (DRF-Luftrettung) Helicopter Base Dresden between January 2008 and December 2009 were recorded on a standardized protocol and transferred to a central computer database. Subsequently, all cases were analyzed with special regard to suicides.

There were a total of 3,051 cases during the study period. Fifty-nine cases (1.9%) were related to suicide. The helicopter was on the scene within 10.9 minutes. The mean NACA Score was 4.9. The mean age was 51.6. A total of 52.5% of patients were male. In 15.2% of the cases, the patient called for emergency help; in 37.3%, bystanders contacted authorities. The reason for attempted suicide was unknown in 57.6% of the cases. In 16.9%, it was related to partnership, in 20.3% to health problems, in 5.1% to financial problems. The main method of attempt was the use of medical pills (47.4%). Other frequent methods were strangulation (18.6%), stab wounds and gunshots (8.5%), intoxication (3.4%), or unknown (16.9%). Six patients received cardiopulmonary resuscitation, four reached a Return of Spontaneous Circulation, and 10 patients died.

Helicopters often transport suicide victims. This study demonstrates the need for better prevention as well as an improvement of education for emergency physicians working in the prehospital setting.

Many of critically ill patients are being cared for prolonged periods in ED just because of limited number of ICU beds and utilize of ED as the entry point to the health care system. The aim of this study is evaluation efficiency of APACHE III scoring system in predicting mortality rate of the mentioned patients.

This cross-sectional, observational, analytic study was performed in one year period. A hundred patients remaining in ED and necessitating ICU hospitalizing were enrolled by the convenience type of non-probability sampling. Then, the APACHE III scores, predicted and observed mortality rates were calculated using of information obtained from patients' files, interview with the patients' family and performing required physical exams and lab tests.

In the assessment of 100 patients, men group were 56% (56) and women group 44% (44). The age of patients and the ED lengths of stay were 66.07 ± 19.92 years and 5.11 ± 3.79 days respectively. The average (± SD) of APACHE III score of the enrolled patients was 58.89 ± 18.24 and the predicted mortality rate calculated 32.73%; while, the total of observed mortality rate was 55%. The average (± SD) of APACHE III score of survivors and non-survivors were 48.63 ± 16.35 and 67.63 ± 14.84 respectively. So, there was a significant deference (p < 0.001). Also, there was a significant deference in the ED lengths of stay between survivors and non-survivors (3.20 ± 1.34 and 6.57 ± 4.40 respectively, p < 0.001).

In our study, APACHE III score and ED lengths of stay were higher versus other studies in Iran and other countries; which show more critical patients presenting to our hospital and limited ICU beds versus patients. This study results nevertheless there was significant difference between predicted and observed mortality rates, the APACHE III scoring system is applicable to evaluating care, treatment and prognosis of ED patients, as is used in ICU.

Background Recently the number of disaster and mass casualty incident (MCI) is increasing in Korea, but there have been few administrative reports or technical reports for disaster and MCI. An ad hoc basis data collection method is usually incomplete and outdated. This study was conducted to investigate the new surveillance system composed of EMS based real time survey and medical records based in-depth survey.

A retrospective review was conducted of the 119 fire department call center database and ambulance running sheets in one metropolitan city. The data on all transported patients with non-medical reasons (fire, rescue and others) between May 2006 and December 2008 was reviewed. We selected all data from the accidents which had more than 2 casualties to exam the feasibility and conducted in-depth surveillance based on medical records.

The total number of accidents was 2,027 with 2,625 patients. The number of accidents which had more than 2 patients was 307 (total 898 patients) and more than 6 patients was 19 (total 176 patients). Among the “MCI” events, 15 cases were traffic accidents (125 patients, 71.0%), 4 cases were fire (51 patients, 29%). Total 142 medical records (80.7%) were reviewed. Admission rate was 32.4% (46 patients) and overall mortality was 3.5% (5 patients).

This nationwide public EMS system could contribute to the establishment of the systematic disaster database.

Positive collaboration between nurses and physicians is essential in all areas of care especially in emergency practice. This is because it has a significant relationship with the quality, safety, accountability, and responsibility of care. Three areas are positively related to collaborative interaction between nurses and physicians: provider outcomes, patient outcomes, and organizational outcomes.

To examine nurses' and physicians' attitudes towards nurse-physician collaboration in the Emergency Department of Dr Saiful Anwar General Hospital, Malang, Indonesia.

The study was a comparative descriptive quantitative study using a modified Jefferson Scale of Attitude towards Physician-Nurse Collaboration. Data were collected from 47 nurses and 24 physicians who participated in the study. Descriptive statistics, parametric and non-parametric inferential statistics were used to determine group scores and to examine differences between groups, as well as to determine the relationship between demographic characteristics and participants attitudes.

Emergency nurses had significantly more positive attitudes toward collaboration than emergency physicians (p < 0.001). Emergency nurses had significantly higher scores in three of four underlying factors of the instrument: “physician dominance”, “nurse autonomy”, and “caring as opposed to curing”. The effects of gender, age, education, and experience in other hospitals on nurses' and physicians' attitude towards collaboration were not statistically significant. However, experience in the Emergency Department of Dr Saiful Anwar General Hospital was significantly related to participants' attitudes towards collaboration (p = 0.023).

The findings of this study indicate that both organizational and individual strategies should be developed to enhance the nurse-physician collaborative relationship. Inter-professional education may enhance health care professionals' attitudes towards collaboration. A larger and more representative sample is needed for future research, especially examining relationships such as between collaboration of these health professionals and patient outcomes and work place satisfaction.

There has been increased international awareness and a need to provide accessible and essential emergency preparedness training in developing countries that has resulted in the recognition of new teaching needs and number of new initiatives to meet these needs.

These teaching methods have been applied in Haiti before and after the 2010 earthquake. They include: - Established a “Train the trainer” model - Established civilian first responder training - Basic Life Support (BLS) and First Aid - Implemented medical training using the Meti Simulator models - Conducted post-training Disaster drill - Conduction of post training assessment - Succession model of training.

A total of 54 people completed a BLS course and 67 completed a First Aid course. 12 participants completed the First Aid and BLS Instructors course. 95 program participants completed an end of course survey. 41 participants had no prior BLS/First Aid training or exposure. The course participants included 2 physicians, 22 students, 8 nursing students, 7 nurses, 20 teachers, 12 health workers, 5 drivers, and 14 laborers. 92 of those surveyed stated they would recommend this course to a friend. 88 participants stated that hands on learning helped them better learn the course material.

This training model has been well received in rural Haiti and can be applied in other developing countries. We would like to standardize training protocols that will serve as a foundation for self-sustaining higher-level emergency, pre-hospital, disaster training and management. This will improve the general quality of health care delivery. Our next pilot of this program will be in other parts of Haiti and in Khartoum, Sudan.

After the Great Hanshin-Awaji Earthquake, the disaster countermeasures concerning medical care in Japan changed drastically. In 2005, the Japanese government began to develop a domestic, rapid, medical response system called Disaster Medical Assistance Team (DMAT) for the purpose of rapid medical correspondence in the acute phase. As of 12 July 2010, 393 institutions and 734 teams (3,700 persons) were trained. A DMAT is important not only to the response to large disasters such as earthquakes, but also the response to local disasters. It is important to establish the DMAT system of each prefecture and district.

The DMAT system at the local level was described at the 15th World Congress on Disaster and Emergency Medicine. During the present Congress, the development and activities of the DMAT system over the past three years will be reported.

Eight local districts in the DMAT system have been developed, and progress has been made in the fields of policy, operative plans, and agreement among each province. The system of inter-prefecture mutual aid must be built upon in the near future.