The Task Force for Mass Critical Care has issued a list of recommendations aimed at maximizing critical care services during a pandemic or other mass emergency. Their suggestions include increasing critical care capacity and independent delivery times, therapeutics and interventions, and a hierarchy of patient situations to be used in triage decision-making.
The Task Force report was created to help develop a guide for preparedness, not as a policy mandate, according to Chest, the medical journal for the American College of Chest Physicians where the recommendations were published this week.
For complete text of the report, see Definitive Care for the Critically Ill during a Disaster: a Framework for Optimizing Critical Care Surge Capacity in the May 2008 issue of Chest.