Welcome to the web pages of the "MCI Bonn" working group

We are an interdisciplinary team of physicians and students from the University Clinics, Bonn, Germany, as well as paramedics from the Bonn and Rhine-Sieg districts. Our goal is to improve the training in emergency and disaster medicine.

The University Clinics, Bonn, are located in North Rhine-Westphalia, the most populous federal state of Germany. It is a 1000-bed, Level 1 Trauma Center providing patient care in co-operation with nine general hospitals.

It is the responsibility of hospital physicians, emergency physicians and paramedics towards their patients to adhere to scientific findings in the treatment of injured persons.
However, in the event of a major disaster, the majority of physicians face unknown territory due to lacking experience in emergency and disaster medicine.

In Switzerland and several other countries, medical students are trained in disaster medicine and physicians receive ongoing further theoretical and practical training in this area.

We intend to evaluate on a global scale how physicians and hospitals provide for mass casualty incident management in their clinics.
In the interest of improved medical care of our population in the event of major disasters and catastrophes, we put forward that physicians must posses disaster medicine skills and that chief emergency physicians and experienced emergency physicians must provide further training sessions to medical students as well as their colleagues in hospitals.

Mass casualty incidents are mostly caused by natural catastrophes (forest fire, floods, hurricane, typhoon, earthquake, tsunami) and traffic catastrophes (navy, train, road, air traffic). The resulting injuries include polytrauma, burn injury, poisoning and combined trauma.

On a global scale, catastrophes and bomb threats have been on the increase in recent years. Even in Germany, the potential exposure to attacks has increased.

The events in Madrid and London show that attacks can occur in large European cities. We believe there is room for improvement in the clinical management of a Mass Casualty Incident. And we think that this subject is insufficiently covered in medical training. Our goal is improved preparation for the, hopefully never occurring, catastrophes.

We are looking forward to your participation in this survey.