Patient care at the 2010 Love Parade in Duisburg, Germany: clinical experiences.

The Love Parade 2010 was a challenge for both the emergency services and the hospitals involved. The festival, which involved 250 000 participants from all continents of the world, was the scene of a mass panic in a narrow stretch of tunnel, leading to 21 dead and more than 400 injured. This corresponds to level 4 of the German Red Cross’s mass casualty incident severity scale. Recent literature contains extensive information on mass incidents (1– 3). Disasters on a similar scale to that of the Love Parade 2010 include those at the Roskilde Festival in 2000, Brussels’ Heysel Stadium and Bradford in 1985, and Sheffield in 1989 (4). However, the number of publications on the subject that can actually be made use of seems to be relatively low (5). As yet the literature offers no structured evaluation of patient flows and diagnoses that also includes preparations for the actual event. This article aims to provide a structured overview of the number, severity, and urgency of treatments and to assess the measures taken by hospitals, in order to provide a medical appraisal and thereby give the best possible recommendations for planning future mass events. This paper does not investigate the causes of the disaster.