Continuous Victim Model for Use in Mass Casualty Incident Simulations

Discrete-event simulation for health disaster management is a relatively new field. Human victims in these models are usually created with predetermined transitions from one health state to the next, based on a set of triggers which can correspond to treatment procedures performed by physicians, stabilization by paramedics or follow the normal clinical progression of untreated injuries or diseases. In this approach, clinical progression is predetermined and subtle differences are not accounted for. A simulator developed by a team from the Royal Military Academy and the Vrije Universiteit Brussel has successfully implemented a discrete victim model in the past to describe an airport crash scenario. The next step is to generalize this simulator for diverse scenarios where a combination of chemical and physical injuries can happen. To do so, a novel approach to the generation of victims is adopted. In this contribution, the development of a continuous victim model is presented. In this victim model, victims can be assigned both physical and chemical injuries. The dynamic evolution of the health state of the victims follows established injuries models based on trauma registries. Concerning the chemical injuries, a set of existing victim profiles developed by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization are used as a starting set of data, modified for civilian application. The use of a continuous victim model represents a significant advancement over the use of a discrete-based clinical transition model where small changes in timelines of care will have more realistic impacts on the victims health states.To the best of our knowledge, this is the first time that a continuous victim model is used for disaster management simulations.