JumpSTART Pediatric MCI Triage
Walk a pediatric patient (roughly age 1-8, or any child who looks pre-adolescent) through the JumpSTART mass-casualty triage algorithm and return GREEN, YELLOW, RED, or BLACK.
Open the calculator → Runs in your browser. Data leaves only if you deliberately send a problem report from the interactive tool.
Example
- Child can walk
- Yes
Result: Minor (green): child can walk.
The tool opens with these values already filled in. Replace them with your own.
What you enter
- Child can walk
- Child is breathing (before any maneuver)
- After 5 rescue breaths, breathing returned?
- Respiratory rate
- Palpable peripheral pulse
- AVPU appropriate (A, V, or appropriate P)
What this is
JumpSTART is the pediatric companion to START: it preserves START's rapid sort structure but adds the five-rescue-breath rule for the apneic-but-pulsatile child (the pediatric reason for cardiac arrest is hypoxia, not a primary cardiac event, so a brief reversal trial changes the category from BLACK to RED), uses pediatric-appropriate respiratory-rate bands (15-45/min), and substitutes the AVPU scale for adult command-following.
When to use it
Use this in any MCI with pediatric victims - school events, daycare incidents, transportation accidents, and disasters where adult and pediatric victims are mixed. The two rules that catch trainees: (1) any child small enough to be carried out by a single rescuer is JumpSTART, and (2) the rescue-breath check is the only place in field triage where an apneic patient can still be tagged RED rather than BLACK. The category drives transport and care priority during the event; it does not freeze the patient's clinical trajectory and should be reassessed at every contact.
How this is calculated
Romig LE. JumpSTART pediatric MCI triage tool. CHOC Children's Hospital. Public-domain pediatric variant of START.
Source: START / JumpSTART algorithm reference
A reference and educational tool. Not medical, legal, or financial advice, and not a substitute for clinician judgment.
More in Triage and acuity.