Battle of The Streets

On Sunday I managed to get out of the office and work with St John Northern Region who were using WebEOC to manage the prehospital response to the motorcycle street racing in world famous Paeroa. This annual event comprises 20 races on a 1.8km street circuit, with crowds of up to 10,000 separated from the track by mesh fencing and straw bales.

The position logging and Sig Events were used to maintain an overview of activity throughout the day, tracking events such as track opening and closures, pace car laps or incidents in the crowd and on the track.

St John were there to provide an enhanced level of pre-hospital care to competitors and the crowd, ensuring that the towns usual ambulance was avilable for routine calls outside the event, as well as a range of first aid type treatments that you would expect in a ;arge public event. The use of the St John Portacom clinic also enable a large number of patients to be treated on scene, greatly reducing the number of patients that need to be transferred to receiving hospitals.

In addition to St John staff logging data in WebEOC I used the Emergeo Smart Client to plot the course overlay, functional sectors and locations of the Incident Command Point, First Aid, Helicopter Landing Site and other features. The great aspect of Emergeo was of course that not only could the health sector view the data in the browser but we were able to export both layers from the incident to other agencies if required or provide them witha kml file so that they could view it in Google Earth.

During the event photos of key track locations were added to Emergeo and this supplemented photos that had been added from google street view and Internet searches the week before - there is an incredible amount of data that can be added around pre-planned events available during the planning stages.

Waikato and the Auckland DHBs, Ambulance Communication Centre, and Ambulance Midland Region also had access to the incident created before hand so that they could provide support in any Mass Casualty Incident.

The day was a great learning opportunity and increased familiarity around the Emergeo mapping, as well as identifying some refinements to the Incident Action Plan and the need for an Ambulance Event Log, to allow all ambulance regions and comm centre to view a complete event log of entries that have not been raised as sig events.

WebEOC data was added at the Incident Control Point and in an admin area in the St John office (shown). Some great ideas were tested and there will be a number of refinements to the Incident Action Plan as a result, as well as some guidance on how WebEOC can best be used for other pre-planned events.

I'd like to than the District Operations Manager Bruce MacDonald for inviting me up to the event and all of his staff, but especially the event coordinator Hilary Haysom, for looking after me on the day.