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Triage is an important part of emergency management that begins at the incident scene, with primary triage determining treatment and transport priorities, followed by secondary triage at the casualty clearing station and before hospital transport [1]. Mass casualty incidents (MCIs) are rare incidents that differ from more routine multi-casualty incidents in terms of two main factors: (1) the number of casualties and available resources, requiring MCI triage to differentiate between noncritically and critically injured casualties in a situation with demanding time and resource accessibility, and (2) the environment in which these events occur, with the MCI occurring in a potentially threatening environment either due to natural or man-made hazards [2, 3].
The unpredictable nature of the MCI calls for an “all-hazards” approach not only for the sake of patients but also for the safety of healthcare providers. One way to improve triage skills and overcome situation-dependent challenges is to practice diverse algorithms under different circumstances to learn about various hazards and their impacts on victims and healthcare providers.
Mass casualty triage vs. multi-casualty triage
Disaster medicine is a discipline that encompasses emergency medicine and disaster management as well as the unique medical requirements of a community during a disaster. Triage is an essential part of disaster medicine education and prioritizes victims in an environment characterized by resource scarcity and associated with ethical challenges and complexities. Although triage is an important subject, it is theoretically learned via different triage algorithms, which are designed mainly for peacetime, routine multi-casualty, and small incidents [4, 5]. While military or disaster triage is performed in riskier and threatful situations due to natural or...