Abstract
Clinical evaluation is one of the fundamental elements of medicine. There are several factors in mass casualty incident (MCI) that make clinical evaluation more challenging. In the first phase of the management of the patient in MCI, all clinical evaluations should be done in a triage mode. That means, the diagnostic efforts should be focused on identifying immediate life-threatening conditions and quick decision about where the patient should be transferred to, in the next stage. The nature of the incidents allows very short time for these tasks. Another important aspect is the fact that in large-scale incidents the availability of ancillary diagnostic modalities is limited. Due to the anticipated discrepancy between number of patients and the availability of medical professionals from relevant specialty, many times less experienced caregivers, sometimes even from unrelated disciplines, are expected to evaluate and manage complicated trauma patients.
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Klein, Y. (2020). Triage and Clinical Evaluation in MCI. In: Kluger, Y., Coccolini, F., Catena, F., Ansaloni, L. (eds) WSES Handbook of Mass Casualties Incidents Management. Hot Topics in Acute Care Surgery and Trauma. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-92345-1_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-92345-1_5
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