Mass-Casualty Incident (MCI)
Definition
An event that produces more casualties than available resources can immediately manage, requiring special coordination between emergency services, hospitals, morgues, and victim-identification teams.
- Trigger
- Casualty count exceeds locally available emergency and mortuary capacity
- Response phases
- Triage, treatment, transport, and victim identification
- Key coordination
- Emergency services, hospitals, morgues, DVI teams
- Related process
- Disaster victim identification (DVI)
Common questions
What separates an MCI from a routine multi-casualty call?+
The defining feature is resource mismatch, not a fixed victim number. A crash with five injured can overwhelm a small rural service and count as an MCI, while a city hospital may absorb fifty casualties without declaring one.
Why does DVI get involved before all casualties are accounted for?+
Provisional identification and mortuary triage start alongside live rescue because remains degrade and family notification cannot wait for the scene to be fully cleared, so DVI teams work a parallel track to clinical triage.
Related terms
- Ante-Mortem (AM) Data
- Information gathered from family members, medical providers, or records about the appearance, health history, dental treatment, and fingerprints of a person before...
- Disaster Victim Identification (DVI)
- The systematic process of identifying the deceased after a mass-casualty event using the INTERPOL DVI form sets, which standardise ante-mortem and post-mortem...
- Family Liaison Officer (FLO)
- A dedicated contact point between the investigation and the bereaved family, responsible for two-way information flow: collecting AM data from the family...
- Post-Mortem (PM) Data
- Information collected from a recovered body or body fragment : physical description, dental examination, fingerprints, DNA profile, personal effects : used in...
- Secondary Traumatic Stress
- Psychological distress in responders resulting from exposure to others' trauma and death at mass-casualty events. Includes intrusive images, emotional numbing, hypervigilance, and...