Implementation of the Medical Response to Major Incidents Course in Madeira, Portugal

• Autor(a) principal: Vale, Luis Manuel Ramada Pereira
• Data de Publicação: 2020
• Outros Autores: Faria, Rui Nuno, Freitas, Dinarte João
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/10400.26/35060
• topic: simulation; major incident; disaster medicine; medical response; mass casuality; MRMI course; Madeira Island; Portugal; Região Autónoma da Madeira

Background. The Medical Response to Major Incidents (MRMI) course was created in response to the need to train people from multi-agencies on major incidents management. In Madeira, a group of physicians and nurses from SESARAM attended this course and “Madeira International Disaster Training Center” (MIDTC) was created with the objective of providing training in the areas of emergency, trauma and catastrophe. Since its implementation, the MRMI course has been offered in Portugal twice a year in Madeira, Mainland Portugal and Azores. Objectives. To describe the method of implementation and functioning of the MRMI course and, additionally, to study the degree of satisfaction of the trainees. Material and methods. A quantitative study was performed during our last courses, using a satisfaction scale with the simulated clinical experience composed of 17 items with a Likert-type scale, punctuated from one (lowest level of satisfaction) to ten (highest level of satisfaction), in terms of practical, cognitive and realism dimensions. Data analysis was performed using the SPSS Statistic software, v. 25. A p-value of < 0.05 was used as the significance threshold. Results. Twenty-one Portuguese MRMI courses were attended by 1,556 trainees from different professional areas (physicians, nurses, emergency and security technicians, social workers, command and control professionals). One hundred sixty-three surveys submitted by the trainees were available for analysis. A total of 60.7% of the respondents were men aged 30–49 years (71.8%). The overall satisfaction average score was 9.06. The practical dimension attained the highest score (9.12), followed by realism (9.05) and finally the cognitive aspect (8.90). Non-medical trainees’ scores were slightly lower when compared to the scores provided by the medical trainees. Conclusions. Demand for the MRMI course in Portugal has been high, with the number of students increasing since its first implementation. This makes the MRMI course a practical doctrine to implement in Portugal by the national authorities.