Abstract
BackgroundA major incident has occurred when the number of live casualties, severity, type of incident or location requires extraordinary resources. Major incident management is interdisciplinary and involves triage, treatment and transport of patients. We aimed to investigate experiences within major incident preparedness and management among Norwegian rescue workers.MethodsA questionnaire was answered by 918 rescue workers across Norway. Questions rated from 1 (doesn’t work) to 7 (works excellently) are presented as median and range.ResultsHealth-care personnel constituted 34.1% of the participants, firefighters 54.1% and police 11.8%. Training for major incident response scored 5 (1, 7) among health-care workers and 4 (1, 7) among firefighters and police. Preparedness for major incident response scored 5 (1, 7) for all professions. Interdisciplinary cooperation scored 5 (3, 7) among health-care workers and police and 5 (1, 7) among firefighters. Among health-care workers, 77.5% answered that a system for major-incident triage exists; 56.3% had triage equipment available. The majority – 45.1% of health-care workers, 44.7% of firefighters and 60.4% of police – did not know how long it would take to get emergency stretchers to the scene.ConclusionsRescue personnel find major incident preparedness and on-scene multidisciplinary cooperation to function well. Some shortcomings are reported with regard to systems for major incident triage, tagging equipment for triage and knowledge about access to emergency stretchers.
Highlights
A major incident has occurred when the number of live casualties, severity, type of incident or location requires extraordinary resources
Norway has a government-funded emergency medical system coordinated by regional emergency medical control centres (EMCCs), typically co-located with hospital facilities
During major incidents the cooperating emergency services communicate at the scene using a common VHF radio channel, while EMCCs and regional communication centrals for police in turn are responsible for activation of resources requested from scene
Summary
A major incident has occurred when the number of live casualties, severity, type of incident or location requires extraordinary resources. Major incident management is interdisciplinary and involves triage, treatment and transport of patients. EMCCs use national dispatch criteria to allocate the correct resource to a medical emergency. This might be a home visit by a general practitioner on call, a direct ambulance dispatch to the patient location or activation of. The various emergency services cooperate to perform the key elements of major incident management: leadership, risk management, triage, therapy and transport [6]. During major incidents the cooperating emergency services communicate at the scene using a common VHF radio channel, while EMCCs and regional communication centrals for police in turn are responsible for activation of resources requested from scene
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