Introduction: The evacuation of patients in mass casualty incidents is an important part of emergency management. The appropriateness of evacuation strategies determines whether the patients can receive adequate treatment in time. Real-world evacuation cannot be re-performed, but models of evacuation can be constructed through computer simulation. Thus, the different evacuation strategies can be compared in simulations. Methods: There are some important factors in the evacuation strategy: the number and distance of hospitals, the capacity of hospitals, and the number of vehicles. In this study, past mass casualty incidents are used as reference sources for the patient data. The evacuation processes are simulated with well-established software, and the rules are modified according to different strategies. Several strategies with different settings are compared in the results of the patient treatment, and the influence and the weight of different parameters are analyzed. Results: From the comparison of different strategies, the strategy with the shortest time from the scene to the hospital has the larger number of hospitals, a higher hospital capacity, and vehicles for transportation are sufficient. In addition, adding faraway hospitals as evacuation options when vehicles are limited will not reduce the time it takes for patients to arrive at the hospitals. Conclusion: The appropriate decision of evacuation strategy can help patients get proper treatment as soon as possible. In the case of limited resources, different evacuation parameters will have different weights in the outcomes. Computer simulations are ideal for analyzing such complex situations that cannot be reproduced in reality.
Yunchang Chen (Sun,) studied this question.