Background Recently the number of disaster and mass casualty incident (MCI) is increasing in Korea, but there have been few administrative reports or technical reports for disaster and MCI. An ad hoc basis data collection method is usually incomplete and outdated. This study was conducted to investigate the new surveillance system composed of EMS based real time survey and medical records based in-depth survey.

A retrospective review was conducted of the 119 fire department call center database and ambulance running sheets in one metropolitan city. The data on all transported patients with non-medical reasons (fire, rescue and others) between May 2006 and December 2008 was reviewed. We selected all data from the accidents which had more than 2 casualties to exam the feasibility and conducted in-depth surveillance based on medical records.

The total number of accidents was 2,027 with 2,625 patients. The number of accidents which had more than 2 patients was 307 (total 898 patients) and more than 6 patients was 19 (total 176 patients). Among the “MCI” events, 15 cases were traffic accidents (125 patients, 71.0%), 4 cases were fire (51 patients, 29%). Total 142 medical records (80.7%) were reviewed. Admission rate was 32.4% (46 patients) and overall mortality was 3.5% (5 patients).

This nationwide public EMS system could contribute to the establishment of the systematic disaster database.