
Dr. Ilene Claudius
Can you tell us about your research in pediatric mass casualty incidents (MCI)? How did you develop an interest in pediatric mass casualty? Was there a particular patient experience that you had?
I haven’t had a personal experience with it, necessarily—we’ve certainly had some overwhelming car accidents, but nothing to the level that I would call a true pediatric mass casualty incident. These are always tragic events, and especially after Sandy Hook, it became clear that kids could make up a sizable portion if not the entirety of the victim population of an MCI.
We’ve done a lot of work in the PEM [pediatric emergency medicine] community on general community hospitals being ready to see a lot of kids in general. I work with an organization called COPEM [Committee on Pediatric Emergency Medicine] that looks at our pediatric receiving hospitals and makes sure they’re up to standard in terms of delivering pediatric care and having the appropriate supplies. And that’s just for a single routine pediatric patient. So the thought of how a group of very traumatized pediatric patients simultaneously is going to be handled is something we discuss a lot. Continue reading “Interview with Dr. Ilene Claudius, Part 2 of 2: Pediatric Mass Casualty and Systemic Failures in Child Abuse”
You must be logged in to post a comment.