Modern emergencies and disasters are progressively changing from relatively simple, predictable events controllable with standard management solutions to complex critical situations for which managers and first responders require innovative and affordable tools.

The European Project SICMA (Simulation of Crisis Management Activities) provides a modeling of the behavior of the entire Health Service System during field emergency operations, as well as the rules it operates by. Use of simulation technologies offers a significant improvement on current management activities allowing decision makers to confront several organizational alternatives not only with static situations but with evolving scenarios.

SICMA simulates main structural and behavioral elements of maxi emergency and mass casualties, from individual casualties and evolution of their health status, activity of the police force and fire brigade on the accident site, crowd dynamics, sanitary personnel expertise, to ambulance and helicopter transportation depending on traffic and weather conditions. The system also simulates rescue doctrines (i.e. “Casualty Clearing Station” or “Scoop and run”), transportation priorities according to color codes, doctrines for assignment of new casualty to neighboring hospitals, hospital resources and involvement, final clinical outcome of individual casualties. Patient health status and physiological reserve of single casualty is based on the ABCD ATLS system, considering with a simple algorithm both level of damage and rate of worsening in time.

Utilizing this simulation system, managers who predispose organizational and logistic procedures may modify the main elements in order to identify the optimal resource allocation and the best procedures to save the most human lives.