Orsec-Novi plan

The Orsec-Novi plan (plan Orsec-Novi, \plɑ̃ ɔʁ.sɛk no.vi), or short Novi plan (plan Novi, \plɑ̃ no.vi), is a French emergency plan used for a mass casualty incident (mascal), i.e. if an emergency has a significant number of casualties in a limited area . Its aim is to organize the rescue resources to cope with the concentrated casualties. It was formerly called red plan (plan rouge, \plɑ̃ ʁuʒ); "Orsec" stands for "rescue management" (organisation des secours), and "novi" for "multiple casualties" (nombreuses victimes). It is different from the French white plan (plan blanc), which is designed to face a sudden and unpredicted rise of the activity of a hospital. Since 2007, it is part from the Orsec plan (plan Orsec), which is generally designed to face insufficient emergency resources. In a Novi plan, the emergency resources are sufficient. The difficulty is coordinating them. The white plan is often launched along with the Novi plan in order to face the massive arrival of casualties evacuated by the Novi plan. The Novi plan is based on four concepts: The resources should be rationally organized: The resources should not hamper each other, or deplete resources needed by another emergency. This implies coordination of the different forces (firefighters, samu/emergency medical service, police), and assignment of roles (hierarchical sorting); There should be two chains of rescue, one focused on managing the site, the other focused on caring for the casualties; A field hospital (or advanced medical post) should be installed next to the casualties, to perform triage and stabilisation before the evacuation; There should be two commands, one on-site that deals with the management of the rescue operations, the other in a remote site (usually the préfecture) that deals with the reinforcement, the logistics... The "plan rouge" was created in 1978 by the fire brigade of Paris (Brigade des sapeurs-pompiers de Paris, BSPP), after explosions during an urban fire (rue Raynouard, Paris 16e), that resulted in 13 dead and a great number of casualties.