The Ambulance Approach to Major Incidents

1. The Ambulance Approach to Major Incidents

2. Overview Types of Major Incidents Ambulance are Involved in. Our Roles in Major Incidents Road Traffic Crashes form a significant proportion of our major incidents. We use the same approach for all major incidents but Road Traffic Crashes have some unique roles and issues. Ideal Incident Layout v Road Traffic Crash Layout. METHANE v Send Help It’s Terrible. Major Incident and Emergency Plan The 5 R’s Impact on BAU of major incidents

3. Types of Major Incident Ambulance are Involved in. • The Obvious Natural Disasters: Earthquakes, Volcanoes, Tornado’s. • The not so Obvious: Floods (affects BAU), Storms mean the need to plan with hospitals approach to care, Heat Wave, Severe Cold. • Man Made: Public Disorder (riot, explosion, protests), CBR/Hazmat, Building collapse, Industrial, Mass Transport Crashes. • Medical: Pandemic • Easily the biggest however is Road Traffic Crashes.

4. Key Roles and Responsibilities • Scene Assessment with Triage - high priority – can mean checking and leaving someone who is critically injured. • Operations Manager • Ambulance Commander - hands off – can be difficult for a clinician to do and perception of others can be they are not helping. • Treatment • Communications • Loading • Controller • Liaison • Air Desk • PIM • Logistics • Team approach to incident management - CIMS

5. Triage • To sort. • Means that the Triage Officer does only triage and very little treatment unless immediately life saving and something that they can then move on from. For example open an airway, get a bystander to hold it open and move on. • Can be a trap for young players to get stuck treating one person and miss the bigger picture. • Later turns into setting up triage areas to group everyone as much as possible.

6. Responsibility of Scene Manager • What needs to be considered by the Scene Manager? • Safety • Communications – Scene / management / METHANE • Resources required / available / possible • Coordination / Incident Management Team • Ambulance Management structure • Facilities required / location • Media • Accountability (logs, tracking) • Recovery • Debrief / Reporting

7. Ambulance tools and resources

8. The distribution of injury accidents is not entirely surprising when comparing it with population bases. Even taking this into account however there are clearly some districts that have higher levels of injury accidents than others.

9. There is some variability by month in Injury Accidents with the peak months being December and March. Figure 1 shows the number of road traffic incidents by month. It shows a decrease in the number of road incidents over the past five years. Historically, there were more road incidents during the holiday season in March and December. Figure 1: No. of road traffic incidents by month

10. Annual Trends Last 5 Years

11. Incident Layout.

14. Road Traffic Roles and Issues Roles are Essentially the same for all incidents but: • Need to look out for things like power lines. • Access and Egress are a significant issue. • Between all the services we can be pretty good at closing scenes down ourselves

15. Why an Ambulance ApproachTo Major Incidents Ambulance has unique Requirements and it is Required under: The Ambulance StandardNational Health Emergency PlanAMPLANZ Led to the National Ambulance Major Incident and Emergency Plan ensuring consistency.

16. The 5 R’s • Reduction • Readiness • Response • Recovery • Relationships

17. METHANE • M – Major Emergency • E – Exact Location • T – Type Of Incident • H – Hazards • A – Access • N – Number of Casualties • E – Extra resource

18. Impact of Major Incidents on BAU.

19. Thanks and any Questions.