Management of conventional mass casualty incidents: ten commandments for hospital planning.

The successful management of mass casualty incidents (MCIs) requires standardization of planning, training, and deployment of response. Recent events in the United States, most importantly the Hurricane season in 2005, demonstrated a lack of a unified response plan at local, regional, state, and federal levels. A standard Israeli protocol for hospital preparedness for conventional MCIs, produced by the Office of Emergency Preparedness of the Israeli Ministry of Health, has been reviewed, modified, adapted, and tested in both drills and actual events at a large university medical center in the United States. Lessons learned from this process are herein presented as the10 most important steps (ie, Commandments) to follow when preparing hospitals to be able to respond to conventional MCIs. The standard Israeli emergency protocols have proved to be universally adaptable, flexible, and designed to be adapted by any healthcare institution, regardless of its size and location.