morning lineup firegeezer on 26 Apr 2008 07:53 am
Morning Lineup - April 26
When the truck crashed into the Chicago L station last evening (HERE), the Chicago Fire Department immediately set up a full-fledged, formal triage procedure with those color-coded tags. I am always glad to see good operations run right from the start instead of an after-thought.
Sometimes it is hard to “get with the program” when you’re just a small piece of the operation, but when everybody follows the script, it works just the way it’s supposed to. Teamwork is a big factor in the success of an operation like that, and it’s really rewarding to have one work out successfully.
Chicago has obviously trained and practiced triage operations and they also have the advantage of almost-unlimited rescources to draw from if the incident grows or is massive to start with. You had a coordinated effort of sorting out the victims, providing initial treatement, recognizing the structural hazards and mitigating them, preventing an escalation of the problem (such as a sudden ignition or collapse), and the search for more victims along with their extrication. That’s quite a job.
But what about the 95% of the fire and rescue people who don’t have these resources? These same problems can appear in your area, too. Unless you have prepared ahead of time and drilled with it, an operation like that can end up as a disaster in itself. It takes a lot of discipline to stick with the scenario and not go free-lancing on these things.
Chances are that your county or regional disaster authority has a formal outline somewhere that spells out when and how a triage operation will be established. But so many times these are only written down somewhere because the law requires them to have one on file. It’s important to have regional training sessions to get used to the procedures of a mass-casualty event.
You don’t have to go to all the effort of putting on those artificial wounds and injuries. Just lay a piece of paper on the “victim” that tells what the primary survey would find. The object of the drill isn’t diagnosis, but what you do next. And since that is something that you will probaby have never done in a true emergency before, then it’s imperative that you learn and practice that phase of the operation well.
Now don’t go around thinking that I’m saying that diagnosis isn’t important. It is. You can’t sort out your patients unless you do that phase right in the first place. But diagnosis is something that you already spend a lot of time practicing and doing (don’t you?). I want to impress on you the importance of actually drilling with the part of the operation that will most likely be a once-in-a-lifetime event for you.
Every fire department and rescue squad, including those private ambulance companies, should have a full-blown triage drill at least once a year, no matter how sparsely populated your area is or how far apart your departments are located.
And every morning we have to get this equipment checked out, so we’d better get started with that. I’ll make sure there’s enough coffee.
