During the renovation of the Central Military Hospital (CMH), the Ministry of Defence established a disaster management hospital in the former AZU building, now the home of UMC. The military emergency hospital, now called Major Incident Hospital, was intended to provide the infrastructure for the care of large of numbers of military casualties. In recent years, a growing demand has also arisen to make the space available somehow for the Civil Major Incident Relief Organisation. During construction it had already been decided that the UMC's Intensive Care 1/Clinical Toxicology department and the RIVM's National Poison Information Centre should be established as operational units in the hospital.
Moving the Major Incident Hospital to operational status was accelerated with the outbreak of the Gulf War in 1990. The CMH as well as the UMC and the NVIC played an important part in both these and other developments in the Major Incident Hospital. Since then, the collaboration has made it possible to admit groups of people quickly and efficiently for observation and treatment in the Major Incident Hospital.