Preparedness for mass gatherings: rescue and emergency medical services' workloads during mass gathering events.

Background: Mass gathering (MG) events may cause delayed emergency responses via various mechanisms and strain the resources of local emergency services. Therefore, preparedness, including adequate pre-planning and sufficient resourcing during MG events, is vital. The aim of this retrospective register study was to investigate the impact of MG events on the workload of rescue and emergency medical service (EMS) personnel during events to enable more precise and sufficient deployment of these authorities' operative resources.

Preparedness for Mass Gatherings: Factors to Consider According to the Rescue Authorities.

: Mass gatherings cause a need for multi-authority preparedness in order to ensure the safety of the event participants and to minimize delays in response for emergencies. Rescue authorities are key players in the pre-planning phase; however, their own point of view regarding all aspects of preparedness for mass gatherings is not well known. The aim of this study was to investigate what factors, according to the rescue authorities, need to be considered when preparing for mass gatherings.

The risk factors Finnish paramedics recognize when performing emergency response driving.

Objective: Paramedics face several safety risks in their occupation, and crashes during emergency response driving (ERD) are quite common. However, there is a need for more research to develop educational and implementation suggestions to determine how these risks can be reduced and managed. In this study, we examined what risk factors Finnish paramedics recognize when performing ERD.