Abstract

Session presented on: Wednesday, July 24, 2013:

Purpose: On January 6, 2005, a freight train carrying three tanker cars of liquid chlorine was inadvertently switched onto an industrial spur in central Graniteville, South Carolina. The train then crashed into a parked locomotive and derailed. This caused one of the chlorine tankers to rupture and immediately release ~60 tons of chlorine. Chlorine gas infiltrated the town with a population of 7,000. This research focuses on the victims who received emergency care in South Carolina. The objective of presentation is to describe the methods of evaluating currently available triage models for their efficacy in appropriately triaging the surge of patients after an all-hazards disaster.

Methods: We developed a method for evaluating currently available triage models using extracted data from medical records of the victims from the Graniteville chlorine disaster.

Results: With our data mapping and decision tree logic, we were successful in employing the available extracted clinical data to estimate triage categories for use in triage effectiveness research.

Conclusion: The methodology outlined in this paper can be used to assess the performance of triage models after a disaster. The steps are reliable and repeatable and can easily be extended or applied to other disaster datasets.

Author Details

Joan Marie Culley, PhD, MPH, MS, RN, CWOCN; Abbas Tavakoli, DrPH, MPH, ME; Erik R. Svendsen, PhD, MS, BS; Jean B. Craig, PhD, MS, BS

Sigma Membership

Unknown

Type

Presentation

Format Type

Text-based Document

Study Design/Type

N/A

Research Approach

N/A

Keywords:

Triage Effectiveness Research, All Hazard Mass Casualty Triage, Data Mining Techniques

Conference Name

24th International Nursing Research Congress

Conference Host

Sigma Theta Tau International

Conference Location

Prague, Czech Republic

Conference Year

2013

Rights Holder

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All permission requests should be directed accordingly and not to the Sigma Repository.

All submitting authors or publishers have affirmed that when using material in their work where they do not own copyright, they have obtained permission of the copyright holder prior to submission and the rights holder has been acknowledged as necessary.

Acquisition

Proxy-submission

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Gleaning data from disaster: A hospital-based data mining method to studying all-hazard triage after a chemical disaster

Prague, Czech Republic

Session presented on: Wednesday, July 24, 2013:

Purpose: On January 6, 2005, a freight train carrying three tanker cars of liquid chlorine was inadvertently switched onto an industrial spur in central Graniteville, South Carolina. The train then crashed into a parked locomotive and derailed. This caused one of the chlorine tankers to rupture and immediately release ~60 tons of chlorine. Chlorine gas infiltrated the town with a population of 7,000. This research focuses on the victims who received emergency care in South Carolina. The objective of presentation is to describe the methods of evaluating currently available triage models for their efficacy in appropriately triaging the surge of patients after an all-hazards disaster.

Methods: We developed a method for evaluating currently available triage models using extracted data from medical records of the victims from the Graniteville chlorine disaster.

Results: With our data mapping and decision tree logic, we were successful in employing the available extracted clinical data to estimate triage categories for use in triage effectiveness research.

Conclusion: The methodology outlined in this paper can be used to assess the performance of triage models after a disaster. The steps are reliable and repeatable and can easily be extended or applied to other disaster datasets.