What's the Hartford consensus and why does it matter?

Following the horrific events that occurred at Sandy Hook Elementary School, a joint committee was created. Their focus was to enhance survivability in times of mass casualty incidents at home. And really what they did is they got together to look at lessons learned from that incident, tie those together with best practices from the battlefield, from civilian medicine, and see how we can enhance survivability during mass casualty incidents. This became known as the Hartford Consensus and this consists of multiple reports. But really what it did is it gave us a set of guidelines that we can follow in civilian pre-hospital medicine and emergency response for mass casualty incidents so we can prevent death.

One of the things that the committee realized is that waiting for EMS is not the answer when you have people bleeding out.