Why you need us
Decades of real-world experience in emergency medicine, critical care transport, public safety operations, and large-event management.
Professional services designed for organizations of all sizes—from first-time event organizers to established event producers.
We work alongside your team, local agencies, and community partners to build practical, achievable safety solutions.
Modern communication, situational awareness, and operational tools that improve coordination and decision-making.
Our planning focuses not only on preventing incidents but also ensuring your team is ready to respond when challenges arise.
Click here to reveal the published evidence behind why this matters.
Peer-reviewed mass-gathering models put patient presentations near one per 1,000 attendees across event types. This baseline expectation can guide staffing levels before the gates open. Rates run higher for concerts, EDM festivals, and motorsports, which we take into account when planning. Dedicated medical planning is warranted for any events that over 1,000 attendees.
Arbon, P., Bridgewater, F. H. G., & Smith, C. (2001). Mass gathering medicine: A predictive model for patient presentation and transport rates. Prehospital and Disaster Medicine, 16(3), 150–158.
Crowd-crush harm scales with density (people per square meter), not total attendance. Below ~4 people/m² is generally safe; between 6 and 7/m² people are pressed together, and as density nears ~10/m² compressive asphyxia sets in. A few hundred people in a bottleneck can be deadlier than tens of thousands spread out. Mitigation targeting density, exits, and flow matters far more than the total attendance number.
Still, G. K. (2014). Introduction to crowd science. CRC Press.
Every event stands up a diverse team. Venue ops, contracted medical, private security, volunteers, and local public safety all come together to provide support. The problem? Different systems. Overcoming differences in physical communication systems such as radios or wifi networks or different terminology are vital to a successful event. Studies of mass-gathering teams find they often don’t understand one another’s roles or technical language. Public safety spent $7B (2012) building FirstNet, a dedicated public safety data network. The event world has no equivalent — the network must be built for each event, and crowds can saturate cellular capacity, decreasing communications capability even further. At Waveform we build a robust communication network and bridge the gap between the event team and public safety partners.
Gallagher, J. C. (2018).
The First Responder Network (FirstNet) and next-generation
communications for public safety: Issues for Congress
(CRS Report No. R45179). Congressional Research Service.
Bistaraki,
A., & Stefanopoulos, N. (2024). Interorganizational
knowledge transfer in mass gatherings: Exploring the health and
safety stakeholders’ perceptions participating in the Athens
Marathon. Prehospital and Disaster Medicine, 39(2), 163.
At events, the overwhelming majority of presentations are minor and handled on the spot by the on-site medical team. At one 400,000-person festival, roughly 12,500 people were treated on-site and only 152 needed a hospital, easing the load on community EMS and emergency departments. That depends on tiered medical staffing scaled to the event, and a coordinated response framework tying field teams to event leadership and public safety. This keeps public safety resources available, decreases response times to the event, and ensures the true emergencies are handled appropriately.
Spaepen, K., Cardinas, R., Haenen, W. A. P., Kaufman, L., & Hubloue, I. (2023). The impact of in-event health services at Europe’s largest electronic dance music festival on EMS and ED in the host community. International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 20(4), 3207.
You can’t shorten response time if responders can’t find the emergency. All team members seeing a real-time common operating picture showing every team member, resource, and incident location on one map turns "where are you?" into a question of the past and drastically reduces the load on a communications network during the event.
National Institute of Justice. (2021). Notes from the field: Providing reliable interoperability for first responders. U.S. Department of Justice.