Free «Week Eight Forum: Emergence Treatment» Essay Paper

A disaster is a state of extreme ruin and misfortune, whereby triage is an important process aimed at determining the priority of treating patients based on how badly they have been injured. It is applied when resources are scarce for all patients to be treated immediately. Therefore, “triage” is a French word that stands for selection or separation (Benson, Koenig, & Schultz, 2011). It involves determining means of transportation of patients, order in which emergence treatment will be administered, and finally the terminus of the patient. It can also be used for those at emergence departments or even during the process of telephoning the medical facility for advice. The triage system in China has many gaps that require effective solutions.

Aspects and Methods of Disaster Triage

There are several methods of triage. Firstly, the simple one is used in the event of an accident or an incident involving the use of mass casualty. It plays a role in helping to sort patients differentiating who are in a critical condition and those with fewer injuries (Reilly & Markenson, 2010). For critically injured patients, means of transportation are vital for survival. Thus, the simple triage is started before the latter becomes available. On completion, a patient is labeled; the label contains his or her identity, assessment outcomes and the indication of priority in need of medication. Labels are termed as triage tags (Benson et al., 2011).

The second method is advanced triage. In case of a disaster, trained doctors and nurses may decide that some seriously injured people should receive medical attention since due to their condition they may not survive if an immediate medication is not administered. The method is used to divide the available scarce resources in order to be able to help those patients that have chances for survival (Reilly & Markenson, 2010). It becomes necessary to use advanced triage when the medical staff decides that the available resources are not enough to support all injured. Furthermore, its use is common in such events as mass shootings, earthquakes, and rail accidents, where a lot of people are hurt (Andreatta et al., 2010).

Continuous integrated triage is an efficient approach whereby in the event of casualties, it involves sensitivity to both psychosocial and disaster-associated health issues affecting a number of patients seeking medical and surgery care. It combines the advanced one and simple forms of triage in relation to the kind of resources available (Andreatta et al., 2010).

The fourth type is reverse triage, whereby prioritization concerns patient’s admission. In addition, it can involve discharging patients earlier when the medical system is stressed. Thus, in the event of triage, patients’ assessments are conducted, and those who are not in a critical condition are to be discharged while those who are seriously injured are admitted (Reilly & Markenson, 2010).

The last methods are under triage and over triage. The former is characterized by the underestimation of illness or injury severity. Its example is the categorization of patients such as ones who are immediate and delayed. On the other hand, in case of over triage, there is the overestimation of the severity of an illness or an injury. A perfect example is the grouping of patients with minimal injuries and delayed ones (Bostick et al., 2008).

The unique knowledge can be used in my community in China when solving disaster problems, which need to address social determinants of health and development. Thus, disaster management has to be done in this order, namely, the introduction to the problem-solving process, critical thinking of the problem, its definition and analysis (Zhong, Clark, Hou, Zang, & FitzGerald, 2014). The authors focus on social determinants of health and development, generation and choice of solutions, and finally their application (Zhong et al., 2014). Different weather patterns have affected my community in many ways. For example, there was a case when temperatures were too hot to bear them. Suddenly, from nowhere a lot of rainfall fell, that resulted in floods sweeping away people’s property and causing massive destruction and danger to life (Bostick et al., 2008).

Conclusion

Disaster triage methods above are employed when it comes to the handling of casualties. However, in my community, there is a knowledge gap, which should be addressed, especially for the growing population of China to be able to manage a possible disaster. Thus, the analysis on disaster management above is practical and should be used in the event of a casualty.