134 The major incident app- an improved way to contact staff in major incidents
Authors: Hulme Peter , Madden Alannah , Reynard Charlie 
Published: January 2021

Aims/Objectives/Background

Major incidents are thankfully rare events but require appropriate planning and training to ensure the best response for patients and staff. The method of contacting staff in these incidents is key and needs to be quick, reliable and have excellent response times to be effective. The best method of contacting staff has not been ascertained.

The Major Incident App (MIA) is a new way to contact staff in major incidents and sends loud alerts even when phones are on silent mode. This study looks to compare the major incident response times using MIA with the previous way of contacting staff in a major incident- a freely available digital messaging platform (DMP) at Manchester Foundation Trust.

Methods/Design

The decision to declare a major incident or standby was determined by the consultant in Emergency Medicine who was in the department at the time of the incident. The receiving consultants would read the message as soon as they saw it and respond appropriately. After the incidents we conducted a retrospective review of digital communication records to ascertain the time taken for a DMP or MIA message declaring an incident to be seen and read by the receiving consultants.

Reading the message within 15 minutes was regarded as an ‘excellent’ response time and within 60 minutes was regarded as a ‘good’ response. These time intervals were determined by the expert opinion of five Major Trauma consultant experts at Manchester Foundation Trust.

A Wilcoxon rank sum test was used to compare the two methods.

Abstract 134 Figure 1Abstract 134 Figure 2Abstract 134 Table 1

Incidents using WhatsApp

Incident TypeDateTimeDay of the weekAve Response time minsMedian response times minsSeen within 15 mins (%)Seen within 1hr (%)Simulated 29/3/17 10:38 Wednesday 76.6 30 9/25 (36%) 15/25 (60%) Manchester Arena Attack 22/5/17 22:55 Monday 99.3 9.5 15/26 (57.6%) 20/26 (76.9%) Simulated 16/9/17 10:40 Saturday 79.9 10 18/23(78.2%) 22/23 (95.6%) City centre Fire 30/12/17 17:29 Saturday 30.5 8 17/25 (68%) 21/25 (84%) Simulated 18/9/18 09:35 Tuesday 17.8 4 19/24 (79.1%) 22/24 (91.7%) Multiple Stabbing 11/10/19 12:05 Friday 86.5 33.5 11/28 (39.2%) 16/28 (57.1%) Chemical Incident 11/10/19 13:46 Friday 56.5 21.5 9/26 (34.6%) 20/26 (76.9%) Multiple Stabbing 15/10/19 16:46 Tuesday 23.9 11 15/27 (55.5%) 25/27 (92.6%) New Years Eve multiple traumas 1/1/20 04:14 Wednesday 184.3 219 4/26 (15.3%) 6/26 (23%) Overall 117/230 (50.8%) 167/230 (72.6%) Abstract 134 Table 2

Incident using MIA

Incident TypeDateTimeDay of the weekAve Response time minsMedian response times minsSeen within 15 mins (%)Seen within 1hr (%)City Centre fight 31/5 20:54 Sunday 1.3 1 22/22 (100%) 22/22
(100%)

Results/Conclusions

Response times were significantly better with MIA compared to DMP p-value<0.001 (see Tables 1 and 2) and all messages were seen within 4 minutes. Although the numbers of incidents are small, this study shows that incident response times can be significantly improved with the MIA that alerts phones in silent mode.