Half of key UK hospital doctors 'ill-prepared' for major incident
Half of key hospital doctors likely to be involved in responding to a major incident in the UK are not properly prepared, a survey has suggested.
Researchers said incidents including the Manchester Arena attack and the Grenfell Tower fire in London demonstrated the need for an incident plan.
But doctors are less prepared than their peers were in 2006, when the last survey looking at this issue was carried out, findings published in the Emergency Medicine Journal suggest.
Researchers at Oxford University conducted a phone survey to find out if the relatively low level of preparedness more than a decade ago had changed.
They contacted 296 specialist trainees (on-call registrars) in emergency medicine, trauma and orthopaedics, anaesthetics and general surgery from 74 hospital trusts that had dealt with more than 30,000 patients in emergency care in the first three months of 2017.
They had responses from 186 (63%), while the rest did not respond or did not consent to being included in the survey.
All hospitals in England are required to have a major incident plan (MIP) to respond to an incident involving a large number of casualties. Half of specialist on-call registrar respondents had not read the plan at all, while about one in four had read part of it.
