The COVID-19 pandemic has led to social distancing and decreased travel in the United States. The impact of these interventions on trauma and emergency general surgery patient volume has not yet been described.
Leadership, communication, and collaboration are important in well-managed trauma resuscitations. We surveyed resuscitation team members (attendings, fellows, residents, and nurses) in a large urban trauma center regarding their impressions of collaboration among team members and their satisfaction with patient care decisions.
Firearm-related spinal cord injuries are commonly missed in the initial assessment as they are often obscured by concomitant injuries and emergent trauma management. These injuries, however, have a significant health and financial impact. The objective of this study was to examine firearm-related spinal cord injuries and identify predictors of presence of such injuries in adult trauma patients.
We aimed to assess the reproducibility of empirical research by determining the availability of components required for replication of a study, including materials, raw data, analysis scripts, protocols, and preregistration.
Trauma is the leading cause of death for young Americans. Increased school violence, combined with an emphasis on early hemorrhage control, has boosted demand to treat injuries in schools. Meanwhile, coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) has made educating the public about trauma more difficult. A federally funded high school education program in development, called First Aid for Severe Trauma™ (FAST™), will teach students to aid the severely injured. The program will be offered in instructor-led, web-based, and blended formats. We created a program to prepare high school teachers to become FAST instructors via “virtual” in-person (VIP) instruction. We used a webinar followed by VIP skills practice, using supplies shipped to participants’ homes. To our knowledge, no prior studies have evaluated this type of mass, widely distributed, VIP education.
Traumatic intracranial hemorrhages (TIH) have traditionally been managed in the intensive care unit (ICU) setting with neurosurgery consultation and repeat head CT (HCT) for each patient. Recent publications indicate patients with small TIH and normal neurological examinations who are not on anticoagulation do not require ICU-level care, repeat HCT, or neurosurgical consultation. It has been suggested that these patients can be safely discharged home after a short period of observation in emergency department observation units (EDOU) provided their symptoms do not progress.
Patients with trauma-induced coagulopathies may benefit from the use of antifibrinolytic agents, such as tranexamic acid (TXA). This study evaluated the safety and efficacy of TXA in civilian adults hospitalized with traumatic hemorrhagic shock.
Distal forearm fractures (DFF) account for 1.5% of emergency department (ED) visits in the United States. Clinicians frequently obtain imaging above/below the location of injury to rule out additional injuries. We sought to determine the incidence of associated proximal fractures (APF) in the setting of DFF and to evaluate the imaging practices in a nationally representative sample of EDs.
There is no widely used method for communicating the possible need for surgical intervention in patients with traumatic brain injury (TBI). This study describes a scoring system designed to communicate the potential need for surgical decompression in TBI patients.
Prior studies have reported that during the period of Daylight Saving Time (DST) adjustment, there are a greater number of motor vehicle collisions. These studies noted that the increase in collisions occurs mainly on the following Monday after the time change. We hypothesize that changes in sleep patterns may be one of the reasons for this increase.
By working with our institutional legal counsel and risk management team, we have been able to create a video review process that complies with legal requirements. Literature on this subject has not described the process of obtaining video recordings.
Mild traumatic brain injury (mTBI) is a common cause for visits to the emergency department (ED). The actual time required for an ED workup of a patient with mTBI in the United States is not well known. National emergency medicine organizations have recommended reducing unnecessary testing, including head computed tomography (CT) for these patients. To examine this issue, we developed a care map that included each step of evaluation of mTBI (Glasgow Coma Scale Score 13–15) – from initial presentation to the ED to discharge.
An alternate approach would be to position naloxone kits where they are most needed in a community, in a manner analogous to automated external defibrillators. We hypothesized that opioid overdoses would show geospatial clustering within a community, leading to potential target sites for such publicly deployed naloxone (PDN).
This was a secondary analysis from a prospective cohort study of all trauma patients transported by ALS units over a 14-month period. We included patients who received intravenous access and were transported to a Level I trauma center.
