A young male patient was playing hockey on an ice-covered pond and became injured; he remains on the ice. As you arrive on scene, a park ranger informs you that the ice is 12 inches thick and poses no danger of collapse. In this situation, which action would be most appropriate to help keep you safe while accessing and extricating the patient?

Scene size-up is a process that emergency medical services (EMS) use to assess a scene before and after arriving, to ensure the scene is safe and to summon the right resources. It's a mental process that should take no more than 30 seconds and should occur before attempting to enter the scene.  The process involves: - Reviewing dispatch information: Emergency medical dispatchers (EMDs) are trained to extract information that helps determine response priority, numbers of units needed, safety concerns, and even what entrance to use. - Observing the scene for hazards: This includes traffic,... Show more

Scene size-up is a process that emergency medical services (EMS) use to assess a scene before and after arriving, to ensure the scene is safe and to summon the right resources. It's a mental process that should take no more than 30 seconds and should occur before attempting to enter the scene. 

The process involves:
- Reviewing dispatch information: Emergency medical dispatchers (EMDs) are trained to extract information that helps determine response priority, numbers of units needed, safety concerns, and even what entrance to use.
- Observing the scene for hazards: This includes traffic, unstable structures, downed electrical lines, swift-moving water, violence, explosions or toxic gas exposure, environmental conditions, extremes in weather, rain, snow, storms, or other acts of nature, hazardous substances, chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear, and explosive.
- Determining the mechanism of injury or illness: This includes establishing body substance isolation.
- Determining the number of patients: This can be gathered through observations of the scene and questions of bystanders. 

The five components of the size-up are: number of patients, mechanism of injury/nature of illness, resource determination, standard-precautions determination, and scene safety. 

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