A consensus based template for reporting of pre-hospital major incident medical management
Sammanfattning
BACKGROUND:
Structured reporting of major incidents has been advocated to improve the care provided at future
incidents. A systematic review identified ten existing templates for reporting major incident medical
management, but these templates are not in widespread use. We aimed to address this challenge by
designing an open access template for uniform reporting of data from pre-hospital major incident
medical management that will be tested for feasibility.
METHODS:
An expert group of thirteen European major incident practitioners, planners or academics participated
in a four stage modified nominal group technique consensus process to design a novel reporting
template. Initially, each expert proposed 30 variables. Secondly, these proposals were combined and
each expert prioritized 45 variables from the total of 270. Thirdly, the expert group met in Norway to
develop the template. Lastly, revisions to the final template were agreed via e-mail.
RESULTS:
The consensus process resulted in a template consisting of 48 variables divided into six categories;
pre-incident data, Emergency Medical Service (EMS) background, incident characteristics, EMS
response, patient characteristics and key lessons.
CONCLUSIONS:
The expert group reached consensus on a set of key variables to report the medical management of
pre-hospital major incidents and developed a novel reporting template. The template will be freely
available for downloading and reporting on http://www.majorincidentreporting.org. This is the first
global open access database for pre-hospital major incident reporting. The use of a uniform dataset
will allow comparative analysis and has potential to identify areas of improvement for future
responses.