Mass gathering medicine patient presentation and transport rates[1]
Summary
Report outlining the mass-gathering triage literature and developing an Australian mass-gathering triage tool for first responders (St John Ambulance NSW / Monash). Cites the field's canonical ranges: patient presentation rates at on-site health services span 0.48-170 per 10,000 participants, and transport-to-hospital rates span 0.035-15 per 10,000. The tool is built from triage principles, previous mass-gathering triage tools, existing Australian triage systems (ATS), and Australian contextual considerations, and is designed for first-responder use.
So what
Two distinct values to the library. First, this is the citable source for the wildly quoted PPR range (0.48-170 per 10,000) — a 350-fold spread that is itself the strongest one-line argument that generic staffing ratios are meaningless without event-specific factors. Second, it addresses the triage-at-events gap: hospital triage scales assume resources events don't have, and this is the rare published attempt at an event-specific tool, designed for the first responders who actually staff most events. Feeds both ppr-prediction and mci-posture syntheses.
Key findings
- Canonical ranges: PPR 0.48-170 per 10,000; transport 0.035-15 per 10,000
- 350-fold PPR spread - generic staffing ratios indefensible without event factors
- First-responder-usable triage tool built on ATS + prior mass-gathering tools
- Australian St John / Monash provenance - links to the Adelaide research lineage
Read the paper
- Publisher (DOI) ↗may be paywalled
- PubMed ↗abstract · free