WP 6: Best practise of today - R mass casualties

WP Leader: Dr Viktor Meineke (InstRadBio Bw). WP interaction
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Objectives
To reach a common understanding of the generic preparedness planning concept and its components in an R emergency.

Work description
Experience from radiation (R) incidents indicates that only 20% of casualties will remain on site while the rest will overwhelm all hospitals in the area. Combined with the worried-well citizens (1:5 ratio) they will eventually drive the medical system into collapse. Therefore triage, decontamination and provision of first aids are transferred from the incident area to the front door of the hospital. Based on the EU ETHREAT project and available international literature, neither hospitals nor physicians are prepared to deal with mass casualties. A survey on national guidelines in all 27 EU countries regarding medical R countermeasures would be critical for the production of a “best practice model” that could be easily and readily adopted by all major health facilities around Europe. Hospital defence is the most important “gap” in all medical preparedness plans worldwide. Prevention, counter-intelligence, vigilance and proactive measures are fine and in the right direction but when it comes to real life, people will overwhelm hospitals, seeking advice and treatment. Among other products within the ETHREAT project is the collection of EU national CBRN response algorithms. MASH project will identify the key-organization that supervises the specialized medical response in case of radiological/dirty bomb disaster and the person/group assigned responsibility for RN Medical Planning. Both face-to-face meetings as well as a scientific meeting on the European level will be carried out in order to collect all necessary relevant information. Studying all data will result in a “best practice” model that will be augmented with modern biotechnology, state of the art communications and information technology that will help the model to be efficient, practical and applicable for all state members to implement it in a predefined time in order to be able to test it via drills and international exercises.

Milestones
A report (D3) will be generated from this WP and will provide support and foundation to the joint seminar (D4) as well as part of the framework for the WPs 7-9.