In the event of an influenza pandemic, patients with severe acute respiratory failure (ARF) due to influenza will require positive-pressure ventilation (PPV) in order to survive. In countries with widely available critical care services, PPV is delivered almost exclusively through use of full-feature mechanical ventilators in intensive care units (ICUs) or specialized hospital wards. But the su...

The mission of the Combat Casualty Care Research Program of the US Army Medical Research and Material Command is to reduce the morbidity and mortality resulting from injuries on the battlefield through the development of new life-saving strategies, surgical techniques, biological and mechanical products, and the timely use of telemedicine technologies. One of the major areas of focus of the Com...

Hospitals have long responded to acute multiple-casualty events, which lead to short-lived chaos followed by a more organized medical response and rapid health-system recovery. There has been increasing recognition, though, that events can occur that require a prolonged response for many critically ill patients. These disasters will require a well-coordinated regional and extra-regional medical...

OBJECTIVE This study aimed to investigate patient safety attitudes amongst health care providers in Norwegian primary care by using the Safety Attitudes Questionnaire, in both out-of-hours (OOH) casualty clinics and GP practices. The questionnaire identifies five major patient safety factors: Teamwork climate, Safety climate, Job satisfaction, Perceptions of management, and Working conditions. ...

two-thirds were in support of preoperative and postoperative resuscitation or surgery patients who had received care at a forward surgical team or combat support hospital. In this article, we give a brief overview of service-specific casualty transport and discuss the training of US Army critical care nurses before and during deployment to prepare them to serve as critical care transport person...

Surgeons of the United States, Military Medicine, published a supplement titled “Tactical Combat Casualty Care in Special Operations.” This supplement, written by U.S. Navy CAPT Frank K. Butler Jr., Army LTC John Haymann and Navy ENS E. George Butler, altered the course of pre-hospital combat medicine into what we know today as tactical medicine. The authors brought to the forefront the vast di...

Federal funding provides state public and private health care systems the ability to build and maintain a reserve supply of ventilators for emergency response to mass casualty incidents. Studying and planning the ventilator reserve capability requires subject-matter expertise, identification of best mechanical-ventilation practices and quality care standards, and contingency planning. Natural d...

In 2014, CDC published updated guidelines for the prevention and treatment of anthrax (Hendricks KA, Wright ME, Shadomy SV, et al. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention expert panel meetings on prevention and treatment of anthrax in adults. Emerg Infect Dis 2014;20[2]. Available at http://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/20/2/13-0687_article.htm). These guidelines provided recommended best practi...

Disaster planning and response to a mass casualty incident pose unique demands on the medical community. Because they would be required to confront many casualties with bodily injury and surgical problems, surgeons in particular must become better educated in disaster management. Compared with routine practice, triage principles in disasters require an entirely different approach to evaluation ...

Since the time of the Napoleonic wars, health care providers have discussed, debated and invented multiple triage systems designed to rapidly triage victims in order to save the most lives. A key medical procedure in a mass casualty incident (MCI) is the rapid and accurate sorting of victims with life, limb, or serious injuries from those without. There are different triage methods proposed for...