Triage Tags or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the ICU

[Sheeplets]

Other servers (such as Colonial Marines) have systems in place for this which allows collected casualties to be marked according to their priority which have proven to be an absolute GODSEND in high stress, mass casualty scenarios where being able to communicate these sorts of things visually, at a glance, and (most importantly) non-verbally helps to keep confusion in check and keep everyone on the same page. I can't tell you how many times I've seen people die from accidental neglect because Medical was overwhelmed by huge patient influxes. This should help with that.

Here's how it (could) work - You have four tag colors that you can apply to wounded: Green, yellow, red, and black.

Greens are the walking wounded with non-life threatening injuries. Broken arms, flesh wounds that aren't actively bleeding, etc. Yellows are people who need treatment but can afford to be delayed until the more serious cases are taken care of. Reds are immediate life threats, such as collapsed lungs, damaged hearts, and bandaged arterial bleeds. Finally black tags are people who are dead, or are expected to die very soon. Those are the lost causes. If saving one patient in cardiac arrest would kill four others in the process then you should black tag them and move on. You ideally wouldn't see very many uses for this besides separating the dead from the untriaged and stopping people from doing CPR on corpses. Ideally.

Ideally we would just port the Colonial Marines system. tie it to medical HUDs and allow tags to be set the same way you use them now to set someone's status as alive, deceased, SSD, disabled, etc. Doing this would make an appropriately colored square pop up beside their overhead pulse monitor.

 

Put into practice, here's a scenario:

You're a first responder assigned to triage duty in the GTR during a hectic Merc round. Your coworker brings in Vodka Kalashnikov, a Zadovskoi security officer who decided to bum rush the entire mercenary squad alone with a code-locked disruptor while screaming in broken Russian. You scan Vodka and find that his ribs are broken, his lungs are punctured, his femoral artery is cut, and he has bullet shrapnel embedded in his chest and leg. You quickly realize that he is rapidly deteriorating despite chemical intervention. This is a patient in critical condition. You apply a red triage tag, alert the surgeons on duty via the radio, and set him aside along with the other wounded who only have broken hands and shrapnel. A surgeon immediately picks him out of the crowd by his red tag which denotes him as the highest priority patient, immediately takes him into surgery.

Edited March 23, 2021 by UncleJo
the ol necro notification

[Faye <3]

i like this. i think it's a cool idea and would help with hectic medical rounds. the medical HUD ekg thingies are good for getting an at-a-glance view of someone's state but they change constantly and can even mislead you on occasion so triage tags would be v. nice.

Edited January 8, 2021 by Faye <3

[Sheeplets]

Brainblast: Instead of tying it to HUDs or some arbitrary item it might be a better idea to just add this as a functionality to regular hand scanners.

[VisVirific]

Considering that the Integrated Eye Sensors' Medical mode can see and chance the Physical Status/Medical Records, tying it to the Med HUD would be pretty great and more visible (without meshing alongside characters' on-mob sprites, which can already be pretty hard to see in high tense situations), and it would also help with not having to run around to get the specific tag or having to juggle even more with the inventory for it.

The Health Analyzers could also be easier since then it ends up reducing the need to "Examine person, click thing, set triage tag" so it's just going up, assessing the damage, set-and-see the triage mark.

[The7thLain]

I think this would make playing med a bit more streamlined and would avoid the situations in which someone gives a person the wrong drugs because they don't know their exact condition. It would allow for more precise gameplay at the expense of a little extra time to triage, which is something med does already to a degree.

[Vulcenus]

I like this idea a lot, and I'm sure it'll prevent a lot of confusion during high intensity rounds and lower casualties. From my experience, patient prioritization is bonkers 80% of time time, so I'm certain this would come in handy.

[WickedCybs]

Used to do a lot of Medic + Doctor on CM and it was really useful there, little to say other than it should help organization here nicely if people got in the habit of using it. Time is always important so even reducing that time when a surgeon has to pick out which Zavod goon is the most critical out of them all would reduce annoyances quite a bit.

[Carver]

I like it, can't go wrong with more potential HUD integration and Security HUDs have a similar system in place with the various 'criminal status' settings.

[Desven]

Necroing this because Sgtsammac had the same suggestion just now.

[DankLordSupreme]

I'm definitely for this as well. On CM it was great to be able to get stuff sorted out quickly from the first responders (Medics) all the way to the Doctors and Nurses on the ship. When things would get hectic and a flood of wounded would show up, I'd take on triaging and tagging people. A Medical HUD integration would work great for this. 

[KingOfThePing]

My south african sources tell me this is being worked on

[geeves]

https://github.com/Aurorastation/Aurora.3/pull/11684

 

In the Field:

 

Applying:

[Scheveningen]

Looks neat, but could there be any way to make the triage HUD indicators pop a bit more?

[geeves]

it has a little pulsing animation that should make it more noticeable, but i won't mind at all if someone with spriting skills went in and tweaked it up, feel free to DM me for the .dmi