The factors that influenced Australasian emergency nurses to attend their workplace in a disaster were similar to that described in the international multidisciplinary literature. Of particular note, improving disaster knowledge and skills, having a family disaster plan and improving the perceptions of the nurses' workplace preparedness can enhance the nurses' willingness to assist in a disaster.

Outdoor music festivals are unique events given that they are, for the most part, bounded and ticketed, and alcohol is served. They frequently have a higher incidence of patient presentations when compared with similar types of mass gatherings. Often, however, single events are reported in the literature, making it difficult to generalize the findings across multiple events and limiting the understanding of the "typical" patient presentations at these mass gatherings. The aim of this paper was to understand the characteristics of young people who have presented as patients to on-site health care at outdoor music festivals in Australia, and the relative proportion and type of injury and illness presentations at these events. This research used a nonexperimental design, utilizing a retrospective review of patient report forms from outdoor music festivals. Data were collected from 26 outdoor music festivals across four States of Australia during the year 2010. Females presented at greater numbers than males, and over two-thirds presented with minor illnesses, such as headaches. Males presented with injuries, in particular lacerations to their face and their hands, and alcohol and substance use made up 15% of all presentations.

This paper discusses the need for consistency in mass gathering data collection and biomedical reporting. Mass gatherings occur frequently throughout the world and having an understanding of the complexities of mass gatherings is important to inform health services about the possible required health resources. Factors within the environmental, psychosocial and biomedical domains influence the usage of health services at mass gatherings. The biomedical domain includes the categorisation of presenting injury or illness and rates such as patient presentation rate, transferred to hospital rate and referred to hospital rate. These rates provide insight into the usage of onsite health services, prehospital ambulance services and hospital emergency department services.Within the literature these rates are reported in a manner that is varied, haphazard and author dependent. This paper proposes moving from an author dependent practice of collection and reporting of data. An expert consensus approach is proposed as a means of further developing mass gathering theory and moving beyond the current situation of reporting on individual case studies.To achieve this minimum data set with a data dictionary is proposed in an effort to generate conversation about a possible agreed minimum amount and type of information that should be consistently collected for research and evaluation at mass gatherings. Finally, this paper outlines future opportunities that will emerge from the consistent collection and reporting of mass gathering data, including the possibility for meta-analysis, comparison of events across societies and modelling of various rates to inform various health services.3

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The use of the Haddon matrix demonstrates that interventions need to be targeted at all stages of the event, particularly both pre-event and during the event. The opportunity to promote health is lost by the time of post event. The matrix provided vital information on what factors may contribute to injury at OMFs; form this information, event planners can strategize possible interventions.

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