"CRUCIFORM"® Emergency Documentation
Action by Hospital Based Staff
The "Cruciform"® card is also ideal for the hospital environment, particularly if staff are faced with a major incident or, even worse, mass casualties.
Major Incidents
The card should be immediately available at the ambulance entrance for the medical and nursing staff who may be engaged in triage at the door. By utilising the card, victims coming into the hospital can be rapidly sorted into categories for treatment in various areas, if they are not already identified by a Cruciform® card put on at the incident site by the police, ambulance service or hospital medical teams.
Hospital Triage teams can use the sieve card (inside every box of cards) to assign victims to various priority categories for treatment, then “tag” the victims with the Cruciform® card set to the appropriate colour. Triaged victims can then be sent to locations within the accident and emergency department or other locations set up for the incident, where treatment teams can start their more definitive treatments.
The numbered Casualty Details Module from the card can be sent to the police documentation team for their records. A tear off or adhesive number can be given to the paramedics or others who brought the victim in, if they have not already got a number. This way they can be traced if, subsequently, they might need health screening due to inadvertent exposure to some toxic or disease agent, or police or other officials can find them for any subsequent investigations.
Mass Casualty incident
In a mass casualty incident, a hospital might find itself inundated with large numbers of victims. (Over 5500 people sought medical help in the Tokyo Sarin attack – at least 4000 of which made their own way to medical help. Over 900 were seriously injured needing hospital admission.)
The ability to send people to other facilities, while tracking who went where, should prove invaluable and will help to keep the inevitable congestion manageable. Normal administration systems may become overwhelmed, but the less complex Cruciform® system will allow victims to be numbered and simple records made, in the short term, until more definitive records can be made a few hours further on, when staff and systems have geared up.
The permanent record made on the Cruciform® card will allow the health professionals to provide definitive information to a subsequent enquiry or hearing and will ensure that a legal challenge can be properly managed.