In response to this, the purpose of this paper is to present the Vessel TRIAGE method. This novel method facilitates operative decision making by offering a simple tool to assess and communicate the safety status of vessels in maritime distress situations. The basic rationale is to categorize a given vessel in one of four safety levels, which correspond to a specific operational focus for ship crew and SAR responders. The idea of a categorization of safety levels for vessels is adopted from the emergency medicine application area, where triage systems are widely applied to quickly categorize patients in different severity categories (Culley et al., 2014 and Scrofine and Fitzsimons, 2014). Such systems have also been applied to categorizing patients in maritime disasters (Ryu et al., 2010). The proposed method differs from these systems by focusing on the safety status of the vessel, i.e. on whether a vessel can provide a safe environment for the people onboard. Due to the similarities to triage systems in emergency medicine, the developed method is named “Vessel TRIAGE”.