title: Critical decisions.
abstract: As a responder, your actions within the first few moments of arriving on the scene of a motor vehicle crash are crucial to the success of managing the situation. Within these moments, you must size up the situation, mitigate as many hazards as possible, establish incident command, rapidly triage patients and ultimately assess, treat and extricate patients from the scene. In doing so, you must decide when to extricate a patient and what treatment is essential to improve the patient's chances of survival, based on your knowledge, previous experience and a problem-based assessment algorithm.
authors.affiliation: Town of Tonawanda Emergency Medical Unit, Tonawanda, NY, USA.
authors.forename: Kyle David
authors.initials: KD
authors.lastname: Bates
mesh_terms: D000063:Accidents, Traffic; D004632:Emergency Medical Services / Q000379:methods* / Q000458:organization & administration; D006801:Humans; D013997:Time Factors; D014947:Wounds and Injuries / Q000175:diagnosis* / Q000628:therapy