The MRMI – Course
Medical Response to Major Incidents & Disasters

The MRMI course is a standardized course with the aim to teach and train the medical response to major incidents and disasters. The international MRMI courses are based on a standardized concept for organisation and methodology for mass casualty response, illustrated in a course book with the same name as the course, published by Springer and used for pre-reading before the course. The language is English. In the national MRMI courses, the same course design and educational technique is used, but the organisation and methodology may in relevant parts be adapted to national standard, and the language may be native.

History and Ownership

The course was developed 2009 by a group of international experts in the Section for Disaster & Military Surgery within ESTES. Expanding educational activity and an increasing number of centers required establishment of a separate organisation, the international MRMID association, which today is an affiliated member of ESTES. The MRMI courses are run on today 12 international MRMI centers, organising national and international courses and each center has its own budget. MRMID is a non-profit organisation with the aim to support the centers, approve new centers and continuously develop and secure the quality of the training. MRMID is also responsible for training and certification of international MRMI instructors.

From 2009, more than 7 000 participants from 28 countries have been trained. The accuracy of the educational methodology for major incident response has been scientifically validated in in a published study, including a large group of trainees from many different countries.

Design of the course

The overall aim of the course is to train decision making in mass casualty management on all levels, from the level of command and coordination to the level triage and primary treatment of individual casualties. The whole chain or response is trained simultaneously – scene, transport, emergency room, surgery, intensive care, wards, psychosocial support, coordination & command on local and regional level. The reason for this is that a uniformly reported problem from recent mass casualty incidents is flaws in coordination and communication between units involved, and the most efficient way to cope with this is to train them all together.

More information about the course is available on www.mrmi.se ,where the design of the course is further described in a video. On the website is also available address and contact person to the different MRMI centers and a list of planned courses with date, localisation and contact person.

International courses will also be announced on ESTES website. Application can be done on an application form requested from each course organizer.

Access to the course

The course is open for medical staff of all categories and also staff from collaborating agencies. Trainees in international courses must be well familiar to the English language.