New reporting system for major incident responses

The world’s first webpage for reporting major incident medical responses has recently been launched.

Disaster medicine has become a scientific discipline in which there is a pressing need for structured data. In a new systematic literature review, we identified ten templates for the reporting of the pre-hospital medical management of major incidents (1).

Since these templates are infrequently used, the Norwegian Air Ambulance Foundation and London’s Air Ambulance coordinated a consensus process among European experts in disaster medicine. This resulted in a reporting template, which was recently published in the Scandinavian Journal of Trauma, Resuscitation and Emergency Medicine (2) and on the website majorincidentreporting.org. The feasibility of the reporting system will be studied as a basis for future updates.

All rescue personnel who are directly involved in the management of major incidents are urged to report their experiences using the template. The reports will be freely available, and neither authors nor readers will be charged for using the database.

The goal is that health professionals can systematically improve their emergency preparedness for future incidents by analysing previous incidents.