The title of my paper, Area Disaster Planning in the UK, is perhaps grandiose. However, while the need for disaster planning at hospital level is well-recognized, few studies have been published on the results of getting a number of hospitals in a metropolitan area to co-operate in planning on a larger scale.

Following a series of railway accidents, the Ministry of Health in the UK issued a memorandum in 1954 to hospitals in the National Health Service on the arrangements hospitals should make for dealing with major accidents. The main points of this memorandum were that ambulance authorities should be told which hospitals in an area were able to receive casualties; that suitable hospitals should send a senior doctor to the site together with mobile medical teams; and that one doctor at a hospital should be in charge of all the medical arrangements.