Biomedical Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
•
Identify what planning, guidance, and tools
are needed and what related issues need to
be addressed to ensure an effective health and
medical care response to a mass-casualty event.
life, it will be necessary to allocate scarce
resources in a different manner to save as many
lives as possible.
•
Many health system preparedness efforts do
not provide sufficient planning and guidance
concerning the altered standards of care that
would be required to respond to a mass-
casualty event.
•
Recommend specific action that will begin to
address the needs of Federal, State, regional,
community, and health systems planners on this
critically important subject.
•
The basis for allocating health and medical
resources in a mass casualty event must be
fair and clinically sound. The process for
making these decisions should be transparent
and judged by the public to be fair.
Consistent with these purposes,
the panel of
experts was asked to address
the following
questions:
•
What do planners need to know to develop
plans that provide an effective health and
medical care response to a mass-casualty event?
•
Protocols for triage (i.e., the sorting of victims
into groups according to their need and
resources available) need to be flexible enough
to change as the size of a mass-casualty event
grows and will depend on both the nature of
the event and the speed with which it occurs.
•
What key principles should guide the planning
for a health and medical response to a mass-
casualty event?
•
What important issues must be considered and
addressed in planning for the provision of
health and medical care in a mass-casualty
event?
•
An effective plan for delivering health and
medical care in a mass casualty event should
take into account factors common to all hazards
(e.g., the need to have an adequate supply of
qualified providers available), as well as factors
that are hazard-specific (e.g., guidelines for
making isolation and quarantine decisions to
contain an infectious disease).
•
What information, tools, models, and other
resources are available to address the needs of
planners?
•
What other steps might be undertaken to move
toward effective planning for such an event?
This paper summarizes the deliberations and
recommendations of the expert panel.
•
Plans should ensure an adequate supply of
qualified providers who are trained specifi-
cally for a mass casualty event. This includes
providing protection to providers and their
families (e.g., personal protective equipment,
prophylaxis, staff rotation to prevent burnout,
and stress management programs).
Key Findings
The key findings that emerged from the experts'
discussion of the provision of health and medical
care in a mass casualty event are summarized
below. These findings are discussed in greater
detail in Chapters G.2 and G.3.
•
A number of important nonmedical issues that
affect the delivery of health and medical care
need to be addressed to ensure an effec-
tive response to a mass casualty event. They
include:
•
•
The goal of an organized and coordinated
response to a mass-casualty event should be to
maximize the number of lives saved.
The authority to activate or sanction the use
of altered standards of care under certain
conditions.
•
Changes in the usual standards of health and
medical care in the affected locality or region
will be required to achieve the goal of saving
the most lives in a mass-casualty event. Rather
than doing everything possible to save every
•
Legal issues related to liability, licensing,
and intergovernmental or regional mutual
aid agreements.
