What does «Incidente con víctimas masivas» mean in Spanish?
- A mass casualty incident is one in which the number of casualties exceeds the capacity of the available emergency services. It differs from a mass casualty incident, where there are a large number of casualties, but they are within the capacity of local resources, perhaps with the need to extend working hours, bring in off-duty personnel, etc. Both are situations where triage is required. In a mass casualty situation, the triage process is likely to assign some victims to the "expectant" or "dying" categories, where comfort measures will only be provided to conscious victims in the category where everyone is expected to die. Only life-preserving surgeries will be performed. Increasingly, the civilian paradigm for managing such situations is the Hospital Emergency Incident Command System, which is derived more from the Incident Command System than the National Incident Management System. Another is Hospital Emergency Response Training (HERT), which is partially based, for legal reasons, on the National Incident Management System rather than the Incident Command System. It also differs from HERT in that it includes field response by hospital-level personnel, not just hospital care or emergency medical system care. While it is not a complete response system for hazardous materials (HAZMAT) or weapons of mass destruction, it addresses aspects of those issues.