Having undertaken a study of A&E nurses’ experience of mass casualty incidents, JUDITH BARNES says that their skills would be better deployed at receiving hospitals rather than at incident scenes

In the past 28 years, there have been 108 events classed as major incidents in England. These include the King’s Cross London Underground fire in 1987, the Clapham rail crash in south London in 1988, the Hillsborough football disaster in Sheffield in 1989 and the Kegworth air disaster in Derbyshire in the same year (Carley et al 1998, Department of Health 1998).