Planning Help for Mass Gatherings
Summer means mass gatherings, like festivals, sporting events and other popular crowd draws, and those bring their own unique sets of EMS challenges. To help medical directors and their systems better prepare for these high-profile events, the National Association of EMS Physicians offers a new online handbook, NAEMSP’s Mass Gathering Medical Care Planning: The Medical Sector Checklist. Newly updated in 2017, the handbook is available by PDF download only.
Areas covered by the checklist include: medical action plan; physician medical oversight; previous event research; venue medical reconnaissance; level of care; human resources; medical equipment; treatment facilities; transportation resources; command and control; communications; and mass-casualty incident and disaster planning. The document was written by Arthur Yancey, MD, MPH, an associate professor of emergency medicine at the Emory University School of Medicine; Jeffrey Luk, MD, director of prehospital and disaster medicine at University Hospitals' Cleveland Medical Center; Andrew Milsten, MD, associate professor of emergency medicine and director of the disaster medicine and emergency management fellowship at the UMass Medical School; and Sarah Nafziger, MD, associate professor of emergency medicine and director of the Office of EMS at the University of Alabama at Birmingham.
Order NAEMSP’s Mass Gathering Medical Care Planning: The Medical Sector Checklist here. A confirmation e-mail will provide information for downloading the file, which is not available in print.
Find previous mass-gathering coverage from EMS World here.
