Prehospital thoracostomy.

We read with interest the article on prehospital thoracostomy published in the journal [1] and the correspondence that followed recently [2,3]. We work on the unit where the intervention was originally described [4]. In the last 10 years 1079 thoracostomies have been performed on prehospital patients in our system. This amounts to 9% of trauma patients attended in the same period. We are aware that the technique has been adopted by a number of other prehospital services, but the experience of Massaurutti et al. is a rare publication on the subject. We would like to add to the discussion with the following points: