Mass patient Incidence

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I'm working on my seminar for class, and it is about disaster preparedness for nursing. The one question asks about mass patient incidence and what it is. I've looked online and through all my text books. I think it means more patients then the healthcare team is able to handle. However, I'm still not clear. If anyone could respond. I would appreciate it.

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Mass patient incident = disaster.

Means different things to different facilities. Basically it means bad things have happened, or are about to, to a lot of people.

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Specializes in ED/ICU/TELEMETRY/LTC.

Think fire

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I don't know if this is only used in California, however Google HEICS. Hospital Emergency Incident Command System. It is disaster preparedness training/response for hospitals.

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Specializes in Med-Surg.

I believe what you are refering to is a mass casualty incident. You are correct, it basically means that healthcare workers and resources are stretched or unable to cope with patient influx. It is situation in which multiple people are injured in a short period of time. This can be from one single event such as an explosion, a series of linked events such as a 20 car pile-up, or even lots of completely unrelated events.

Disaster preparedness commonly falls under the category of community health although every health care professional has a role to play. If you need more information you can do a quick google search for "mass casualty nursing guidelines", or something similar, just be careful to consider the validity of each source.

Hole this helps,

- Dennis

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Specializes in PICU, ICU, Hospice, Mgmt, DON.

or plane crash...

bombs...

tornado....

any type of disaster with potential for multiple critical victims

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Specializes in LTC, Psych, Hospice.

hurricaine

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I came to another question, that I am having a difficult time answering because it is an ethical dilemma. Are you able to re-triage patients already admitted to the hospital and give early discharge to make room for disaster patients?

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I came to another question, that I am having a difficult time answering because it is an ethical dilemma. Are you able to re-triage patients already admitted to the hospital and give early discharge to make room for disaster patients?

Yes. Happens all the time. My old facility called this a "Code Triage."

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its possible to discharge all potential patients leave a place for disaster because we aim at serving life

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kindly help me colegues i have joined this community but i can't text or share with you help me bx e mail this is the address [email protected]

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Specializes in Peri-op/Sub-Acute ANP.

On 9/11 my facility was expecting mass casualties. We cancelled all scheduled cases, discharged every patient possible, called in all available staff, and closed the ED to anything but level 1 trauma. In the end, nobody came...

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