78 Ophthalmic Care of the Combat Casualty

BACKGROUND Low-threshold and out-of-hours services play an important role in the emergency care for people with mental illness. In Norway casualty clinic doctors are responsible for a substantial share of acute referrals to psychiatric wards. This study's aim was to identify patients contacting the casualty clinic for mental illness related problems and study interventions and diagnoses. METH...

There is a long-standing, broad assumption that hospitals will ably receive and efficiently provide comprehensive care to victims following a mass casualty event. Unfortunately, the majority of medical major incident plans are insufficiently focused on strategies and procedures that extend beyond the pre-hospital and early-hospital phases of care. Recent events underscore two important lessons:...

Combat casualty and en-route care could be improved through immediate expert medical assessment and treatment. New approaches in the delivery of medical care have the potential to decouple the need for deployment of highly trained medical professionals with each advanced unit and the ability to provide sophisticated medical and surgical expertise on demand. The U.S. Army Telemedicine and Advanc...

Violence fromexplosivesand firearms results inmass casualty events inwhich the injured havemultiple penetrating and soft tissue injuries. Events such as those in Boston,Massachusetts;Newtown,Connecticut;andAurora, Colorado, as well as those in other locations, such as Europe and the Middle East, demonstrate that civilian trauma may at times resemble that seen in a combat setting. As the civilia...

To discover new experience-based clinical and care delivery knowledge learned in the Iraq and Afghanistan combat zones, 107 Air Force, Army, and Navy nurses were interviewed. Eight areas of experiential knowledge were identified in the new care delivery system that featured rapid transport, early trauma and surgical care, and expeditious aeromedical evacuation: (1) organizing for mass casualtie...

To the Editor: The South African public health sector follows a hierarchical referral system. District hospitals play a central role between the primary health care (PHC) clinics, community health centres (CHCs), regional and tertiary hospitals. They provide level one (generalist) services to in-and outpatients referred from PHC clinics and CHCs. District hospitals should ensure that patients a...