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Current opinion
Mass casualty events: what to do as the dust settles?
  1. Rachel M Russo1,
  2. Joseph M Galante1,
  3. John B Holcomb2,
  4. Warren Dorlac3,
  5. Jason Brocker4,
  6. David R King5,
  7. M Margaret Knudson6,
  8. Thomas M Scalea4,
  9. Michael L Cheatham7,
  10. Raymond Fang8
  1. 1 Department of Surgery, University of California Davis, Sacramento, California, USA
  2. 2 UT Health, Houston, Texas, USA
  3. 3 Medical Center of the Rockies, Denver, Colorado, USA
  4. 4 University of Maryland, Baltimore, Maryland, USA
  5. 5 Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston, Massachusetts, USA
  6. 6 Department of Surgery, University of California, San Francisco, California, USA
  7. 7 Orlando Regional Medical Center, Orlando, Florida, USA
  8. 8 Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Maryland, USA
  1. Correspondence to Dr Joseph M Galante, Department of Surgery, University of California Davis School of Medicine, Sacramento, CA 95817, USA; jmgalante{at}ucdavis.edu

Abstract

Care during mass casualty events (MCE) has improved during the last 15 years. Military and civilian collaboration has led to partnerships which augment the response to MCE. Much has been written about strategies to deliver care during an MCE, but there is little about how to transition back to normal operations after an event. A panel discussion entitled The Day(s) After: Lessons Learned from Trauma Team Management in the Aftermath of an Unexpected Mass Casualty Event at the 76th Annual American Association for the Surgery of Trauma meeting on September 13, 2017 brought together a cadre of military and civilian surgeons with experience in MCEs. The events described were the First Battle of Mogadishu (1993), the Second Battle of Fallujah (2004), the Bagram Detention Center Rocket Attack (2014), the Boston Marathon Bombing (2013), the Asiana Flight 214 Plane Crash (2013), the Baltimore Riots (2015), and the Orlando Pulse Night Club Shooting (2016). This article focuses on the lessons learned from military and civilian surgeons in the days after MCEs.

  • mass casualty events
  • disaster response
  • military civilian collaboration

This is an open access article distributed in accordance with the Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial (CC BY-NC 4.0) license, which permits others to distribute, remix, adapt, build upon this work non-commercially, and license their derivative works on different terms, provided the original work is properly cited, appropriate credit is given, any changes made indicated, and the use is non-commercial. See: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0

https://doi.org/10.1136/tsaco-2018-000210

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    Footnotes

    • Contributors RMR and JMG contributed equally to this article and should be considered joint first authors. RMR and JMG: concept, data collection and analysis, and article draft and revision. JBH, WD, JB, DRK, MMK, TMS, and MLC: data collection, analysis and article revision. RF: concept, data analysis, and article revision.

    • Funding The authors have not declared a specific grant for this research from any funding agency in the public, commercial or not-for-profit sectors.

    • Competing interests None declared.

    • Patient consent Not required.

    • Provenance and peer review Not commissioned; externally peer reviewed.