SYSTEMATIC REVIEW article
Front. Disaster Emerg. Med.
Sec. Disaster Medicine
Volume 3 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/femer.2025.1615181
This article is part of the Research TopicAdvancements and Challenges in Mass Gathering Medicine: Enhancing Health OutcomesView all 8 articles
Mass gathering Healthcare and Safety: Current Knowledge and Future Directions
Provisionally accepted
- 1Université de Sherbrooke, Sherbrooke, Canada
- 2CRIMEDIM - Center for Research and Training in Disaster Medicine, Humanitarian Aid, and Global Health, Novara, Italy
- 3Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, Harvard Medical School, Boston, Massachusetts, United States
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Introduction: Mass gathering medicine (MGM) has been a rapidly evolving area of expertise for many years, with pearls and pitfalls emerging from recent literature. Gaps have been identified: lack of a pragmatic definition of MGM, weaknesses in data sets used to report on major events, difficulties with developing tools to help organizers assess health and safety issues. This study aims to map and describe the current body of literature on mass gatherings in order to identify strengths and weaknesses in the healthcare response, guiding future research in the field.Methods: This study is a bibliometric review. Using the broad research terms "mass gatherings" and "major planned events", Pubmed, Web of Science and Google Scholar were searched for publications up to Sept. 13, 2024. No restrictions of language or type of articles were used. All grey literature was included. After removal of duplicates, two independent reviewers confirmed relevance, and articles were organized according to date of publication, type of event (7), main subjects categories (11). Further keywords analyses have been conducted using VOSViewer (v.1.6.20).Results: Initial database searches yielded 4526 results. After the removal of duplicates and non-related articles, 898 publications remained and have been categorized, dating from 1978 to 2024. Full text analysis was possible for a total of 854 articles. More than 25% of the articles concerned religious events, while categories like infectious diseases and public health were the main subject of more than one third of the papers. Music events, spontaneous gatherings and environmental/remote events were underrepresented. Main topics like heat-related illnesses and environmental health, training and psychosocial aspects were also underrepresented. Keywords analysis allowed for the identification of areas of scarce knowledge that need further development.Mass gathering health and safety literature has grown rapidly over the past years. This study identified areas of strong knowledge to build upon, while more scarce areas like psychosocial aspects, quality evaluation, management and supervision, training and development of formal expertise are still in need of improvement.
Keywords: Mass gathering, Mass Gathering Medicine, Major Planned Event, Medical response, review, Bibliometric, Research
Received: 20 Apr 2025; Accepted: 12 Jun 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Pigeon, Demers and Ciottone. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Marc-Antoine Pigeon, Université de Sherbrooke, Sherbrooke, Canada
Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.