What Mass-Casualty Medicine Teaches You About Decision-Making by Derek MacDonald
Plan for the worst and hope for the best.
Read on Substack
Stress exposes our fatal flaw — logic and emotion compete. It’s not that they don’t like each other, it’s just that decision making tends to pick one at a time by default.
Emergency medicine teaches triage as a structured process to evaluate and prioritize treatment for victims. If there are 10 victims, for example, triage is used to assess who needs life-or-death attention and in what order.
Life or death? Stop and fix.
Stable? Find out who’s next.
Not stable anymore? Decide who needs to wait.
Navigating a mass-casualty incident requires a team. Their ability to triage victims effectively relies on clear definitions of roles and responsibilities.
onward.
-dmac