Prehospital Emergency Care Practice Test: Scene Size-Up — Flashcards

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.