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Although priority tags are considered important in all training and education, there are few reports on their actual use in real incidents. The aim of this study was to compare attitudes on the use of a simple priority tags to the SMART Tag.
Methods:
A questionnaire was answered by ambulance personnel and the medical teams from hospitals in Stockholm, Sweden, regarding when the priority tags were supposed to be used or were used in their organization. The second questionnaire was conducted during a large-scale disaster exercise at Stockholm Arlanda- Airport. The second questionnaire focused on their experience of the use of SMART Tags during the exercise. Emergency ward personnel are going to be interviewed on how SMART Tag information is communicated when ambulance crew arrives at the hospital.
Results:
In the first questionnaire, 211 out of 409 (51%) answered that they had used priority tags in training situations. Of all 409, only 36 (9%) answered that they had used tags in a real incidents and 142 (35%) replied that they never had used priority tags. The answers revealed some doubtfulness of when to use priority tags. In the second questionnaire, many of the participants stated that priority tags should be used in routine operations compared with how they are used today.
Conclusions:
It is necessary that the field personnel applies the triage scheme and uses the priority tags, not only during a disaster, but also during smaller emergencies, to maintain familiarity. This secures that the tags are used correctly in real disasters.
Although there is information about hazardous materials and related activity during hazardous material accidents, chemical disasters, or chemical terrorism, it is not comprehensive, cannot be accessed easily, and is not sufficient for the specific situation, as in a toxic accident in a household or chemical accident in industry. Additionally, the information is not prepared for the emergency medical response in general. The authors developed a comprehensive database system for medical hazardous materials and assessed the application of the system.
Methods:
A questionnaire was answered by 534 persons who are hazardous materials-related workers, experts, or laypersons about the necessary contents of the database and the methods of application. Forty-six database fields were developed relating to chemical accidents and hazardous materials, the most important contents were extracted through a four-stage process. The database fields were prioritized in 19 classification groups based on an existing database and our survey.
Results:
There were 111 chemicals that were determined to be most necessary to include in the database. The final classification of database fields was eight groups. A Website was constructed of the resulting database for real application.
Conclusions:
Although it has become possible to provide emergency information about chemical accidents, terrorism, or disaster, comprehensive information from the accident site to hospital still is needed for a quicker response, such as die identification of chemicals. The next step will be developing an information-providing system using mobile devices.
Cyclone Nargis struck on 02 May 2008 and was the worst disaster due to natural hazards in the recorded history of Myanmar. It left > 146,000 people dead and thousands more homeless. More than 200 hospitals and 400 clinics were destroyed by the cyclone. Singapore was the first non-bordering country to send a medical team to help Myanmar with the disaster relief efforts and carried out operations using mobile teams.
Methods:
Demographic and medical data from the medical records were collected and analyzed.
Results:
A total of 4,489 patients were seen in nine days at hospitals, eight camps/villages, an orphanage, and an elderly care facility. Of the patients, 65% were female. More than a quarter of the patients were <12 years of age and 16.5% were >60 years old. The pediatrie patients suffered mainly from respiratory (26%) and gastrointestinal infections (28%), whereas the adults had a significant number of mus-culoskeletal complaints (21%), non-specific diagnoses (19%), and chronic medical conditions (11%). Only (6%) of the conditions required surgical interventions. A significant number of complaints were related to post traumatic stress disorder (10%).
Conclusions:
Mobile clinics were useful for treating patients who did not have access to medical care. The post disaster epidemics that were expected were not experienced. Given the patient load, it was useful to have a pediatrician, primary healthcare physician, and emergency physician to cope with the cyclone-related medical conditions.