At the bottom of the Brooklyn Bridge walkway, a cluster of ambulances and emergency workers set up an open-air triage center.
I was standing at the open-air triage center at the corner of Church and Dey, right next to the rubble of the World Trade Center, when a policeman shouted that doctors were needed at the men's-wear emporium inside the 1 Liberty building.
The United Nations said it was freeing up $10 million in emergency relief money, the European Union pledged $4.4 million and groups like Doctors Without Borders were setting up clinics in tents and open-air triage centers to treat the injured.
A contingent of volunteer surgeons from the US states of Virginia and Delaware has set up open-air triage and treatment centres on the hospital grounds.
Seventeen severely injured tsunami victims (19 to 68 years of age; 10 females and 7 males with unknown co-morbidities) needing further sophisticated medical care were immediately transferred to the CMMC (level 1 trauma center) following long distance tertiary air transfer and triage at Cologne-Bonn Military Airport. Cologne-Bonn Military Airport
This study emphasizes the importance of triage for air transport prioritizing the patient that will most likely benefit from a reduced transport time.
Government-operated or contracted fixed-wing and HEMS IFT services are led by specialty air medical crews and are triaged according to distance concentrics and availability to the trauma center.
The fact that air medical units are typically triaged only to the most critical cases means that those ALS providers staffing the helicopters are part of a deployment strategy that enhances skill use.
North Shore University Hospital on Long Island plans to build negative air pressure rooms adjacent to the triage area, so that possible SARS patients can be isolated immediately, without contaminating others in the emergency waiting area or in the corridors leading to isolation rooms.
What developed over the five days, in a hospital ironically well supplied with bottled water and food, and resupplied by air with drugs, was a system of triage that varied depending on which company had responsibility for the patients.
A Norwegian study by Rehn et al. 30 showed higher ability to recognise severe trauma by anaesthetist-staffed MECU/HEMS but did not differentiate between ground and air units, and did not include under-triage to local hospital.
