Month 11; Mass Casualty Incidents Flashcards
(30 cards)
What is a MCI?
- Mass Casualty Incident
- An incident that would overwhelm both pre hospital and hospital resources in the Yakima area.
What is Convergence?
-Rapid gathering of onlookers, rescuers, and the press at the scene of an accident or disaster.
What is START triage?
- Simple Triage and Rapid Treatment
- System used to quickly triage victims of an MCI using the RPM mnemonic and black, red, yellow, green classification tape or tags.
Abandonment
It is not abandonment to walk away from a critically injured or other patient to report to Incident Command, retrieve gear, to continue triage, or to care for another patient.
It is considered abandonment for an EMS provider to leave the scene with one patient, leaving other patients with a provider(s) of lesser skill thereby injuring the patients left behind.
What does green stand for?
-Used for minor injuries. Walking wounded.
What does Yellow stand for?
-Patients with injuries that don’t allow them to move but won’t cause them to die soon.
What does Red stand for?
-Serious patients who are at risk for early death if not transported and treated immediately.
What does black stand for?
Dead or dying patients who did not or will not survive.
What does RPM stand for?
- Respiration
- Perfusion
- Mental Status
Utilize this mnemonic in that order only.
Respirations
- Not breathing, open the airway. If person does not begin breathing, he/she is tagged Black.
- RR > 30 breaths-per-minute, he/she is tagged Red.
- RR <30 breaths-per-minute, proceed to assessing perfusion.
Perfusion
-Assess for a radial pulse or capillary refill.
-no radial pulse or cap refill > 2 seconds he/she is tagged Red.
(exception to delayed cap refill would be a patient in a cold environment)
-Patient has a radial pulse and/or cap refill < 2 seconds, proceed to assessing the mental status.
Mental Status
- Ask the patient to perform a simple task.
- Can you stick out your tongue? or
- Can you wiggle your fingers?
- Assess for verbal response.
- If the patient cannot follow simple commands or respond to you, he/she is tagged Red.
- If he/she can do the above they are tagged yellow.
- They must pass all three RPM assessments to be tagged yellow.
Limited Treatment During Triage
- Open airway or insert an OPA
- Attempt to stop any visible bleeding
- Elevate the extremities for shock
What are the three parts of triage tags?
- Patient Status Indicators (Perforated PT Status Indicators)
- PT Treatment and Info (Status, vitals, injuries, and treatments)
- PT Identification and Tracking (PT Tracking Tags and PT Number ID)
Mass Casualty Incident Procedures
First Responders/EMS
- Immediately establish command (Using NIMS)
- Must be done immediately if the amount of patients may overload local EMS and/or hospital resources.
What is an MCI level 1?
- 1 to 4 Patients, critically injured in a single incident.
MCI Level 2
-5 to 10 patients, critically injured in a single incident.
MCI Level 3
-11 to 20 patients involved in a single incident.
MCI Level 4
Greater than 20 patients all involved in a single incident.
If the transporting agency determines contact with the receiving facility is necessary they will provide them with what information?
- Identification of EMS agency.
- Patients identification numbers (Located on Start Tag)
- Patients START category (green, yellow, red, black)
Radio contact with Medical Control will be preceded with what phrase?
“This is an MCI transmission.”
What is the role of the transport officer?
-Responsible for providing Medical Control with all necessary patient information.
Who will determine the transport destination for each ground transport agency?
-Medical Control which will communicate this to the Transport Officer who will then communicate this to the transporting unit.
What are two common failures in managing an MCI?
- Lack of pre-planning
- Lack of training at all levels.
- Failure to actively command the incident (most common error leading to poor patient outcome and survivability)
