Initially the premise of the rescue services was to deliver patients to medical care as quickly as possible. Due to the demands of the Heidelberger surgeon Kirchner a rethinking was initiated prior ...to World War 2. It was not until the 1960s that this concept was taken up again and physicians were incorporated into the rescue services. A prerequisite for this in the technical field was the development of physician escorted rescue vehicles for the prehospital management of road accident victims. After the economic and medical benefits of the deployment of emergency physicians had been demonstrated, the mandatory participation of emergency physicians was laid down in the laws on rescue services by the West German federal states. With increasing acceptance, there was a shift of the patient collective from accident victims to acute internal medical and neurological emergency cases. In order to realize the necessary efficacy of the cost-intensive organization the German Medical Council formulated guidelines for the qualification of emergency physicians.
Mass casualty events make demands on emergency services and disaster control. However, optimized in- hospital response defines the quality of definitive care. Therefore, German federal law governs ...the role of hospitals in mass casualty incidents. In hospital casualty surge is depending on resources that have to be expanded with a practicable alarm plan. Thus, in-hospital mass casualty management planning is recommended to be organized by specialized persons. To minimise inhospital patient overflow casualty surge principles have to be implemented in both, pre-hospital and in-hospital disaster planning. World soccer championship 2006 facilitated the initiation of surge and damage control principles in in-hospital disaster planning strategies for German hospitals. The presented concept of strict control of in-hospital patient flow using surge principles minimises the risk of in-hospital breakdown and increases definitive hospital treatment capacity in mass casualty incidents.
Benefits of Cooling Are Not Known Trupkovic, Tomislav; Hoppe, Uwe; Kleinschmidt, Stefan ...
Deutsches Ärzteblatt international,
02/2010
Journal Article
PDF
