Disaster Management: it's not neglect, just triage.

Hello everyone, hope you're having a wonderful day.
Once again, it's science time so let's learn something new.

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As someone who literally lives in the hospital, this is what we come across atleast once every month.

What Is Disaster

We've all got a thing or two to say about what a disaster is but for the benefit of doubt, let's just say Disaster could be defined as an event; be it natural (earthquake, volcanoes) or man made (road traffic accidents, oil spillage) that is capable of causing mass casualties.

Source

Mass casualty on its own is said to be when a hospital receives patients from a disaster that are more than they can manage...
In lay man term, mass casualty refers to when a 30-bedded hospital which has 10 doctors and 20 nurses receives 36 victims from road traffic accident.....
If you do the mathematics, you will see that it's overwhelming compared to the number of staff the hospital gets... That is what mass casualty refers to.

It's not easy to manage disasters and it's always too emotional seeing the relatives of the victims struggling for their family member to get treated first and when the doctor doesn't respond to this call, many relatives start causing problems shouting that doctors are neglecting their relative whereas it's never so.. no doctor will neglect his or her patients but for the case of mass casualties, a triage is used for treatment.

What Is A Triage

A triage simply means an act of sorting out patients based on their medical needs... It's an act that allows us know who to get treated first; no doubt, it might not be always right but that's the best shot we've got.

Source

It's done with colour codings and each colour has what it signifies .....

Red: This signifies that the victim in question needs an urgent medical attention, else he'll die within few minutes or hours.

Yellow: This signifies that the victim could still stay up for a little bit time and survive even without medical attention.

Green: This signifies that the victim's case isn't severe, it can wait for long even without medical attention and will still survive.

White: This signifies that the victim sustained just a minor injury, he's still conscious and moves around with the injury comfortably.

Black: This signifies that the victim is dead or very near to death.

Now, what family relatives sometimes want is for medical doctors to leave the victims with colour codings of Red and Black to attend to their relative with the colour coding of White

Now I'll ask you my dear reader,
Does it make sense to you now you've learnt about this?

For us to effectively manage disaster, we ought to be intentional about it...

• Preparedness:

No one ever wishes for something bad to happen but they do happen anyway, so the first step in managing disasters should be to actively make plans ahead of it's happening.
This will entail even doing disaster drills for the staffs who will be involved in disaster management whenever it happens.

• Response:

Now that the disaster has eventually happened, we needn't leave everyone to die but rather we need to respond fast to it.
This will involve making good roads to ease the transportation of the victims to the hospital and others.

• Recovery:

After the disaster has been managed, efforts should be made to help victims get back to their normal life before the disaster happened.
This will entail counselling programmes and health safety education to avoid a repetition of the disaster.

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I hope you did learn something new and you will not shout at doctors when they tell you that you'll be attended to shortly.... It's never neglect, it's just triage!

For further readings...

• https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergency_management

• https://www.physio-pedia.com/Disaster_Management

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Thanks for reading and have a nice day