Trauma care is the treatment of patients with injuries caused by external forces, for instance car crashes, assaults or fall accidents. These urgent patients typically arrive at the hospital’s Emergency Department, where they are treated by an interdisciplinary team of physicians and nurses, who collaborate to identify and address life-threatening injuries. In this thesis, the urgent phase of t...

BACKGROUND In 1999, a new major trauma system was proposed for the state of Victoria, Australia. The guidelines for the new system were aimed at delivering major trauma cases to definitive trauma care in the least time possible. The aim of the present study was to analyse the potential effect of this system on Victoria's ambulance services. METHODS The present study modelled the workload of m...

CONTEXT Despite calls for wider national implementation of an integrated approach to trauma care, the effectiveness of this approach at a regional or state level remains unproven. OBJECTIVE To determine whether implementation of an organized system of trauma care reduces mortality due to motor vehicle crashes. DESIGN Cross-sectional time-series analysis of crash mortality data collected for...

IMPORTANCE Trauma is a leading cause of death and disability worldwide. In many low- and middle-income countries, formal trauma surveillance strategies have not yet been widely implemented. OBJECTIVE To formalize injury data collection at Groote Schuur Hospital, the chief academic hospital of the University of Cape Town, a level I trauma center, and one of the largest trauma referral hospital...

INTRODUCTION The benefits of telepresence in trauma and acute surgical care exist, yet its use in a live, operating room (OR) setting with real surgical cases remains limited. METHODS We tested the use of a robotic telepresence system in the OR of a busy, level 1 trauma center. After each case, both the local and remote physicians completed questionnaires regarding the use of the system using...

The Trauma Resource Allocation Model for Ambulances and Hospitals (TRAMAH) was created to guide health planners in locating important and expensive resources. The model’s solution algorithm combines a mixed-integer linear program and a new ‘‘iterative switching’’ heuristic. The TRAMAH has the computational flexibility to optimally locate various numbers of aeromedical depots and trauma centers ...

BACKGROUND Blunt implementation of Western trauma system models is not feasible in low-resource communities with long prehospital transit times. The aims of the study were to evaluate to which extent a low-cost prehospital trauma system reduces trauma deaths where prehospital transit times are long, and to identify specific life support interventions that contributed to survival. METHODS In t...

This paper discusses mathematical models of expressing severity of injury and probability of survival following trauma and their use in establishing clinical governance of a trauma system. There are five sections: (i) Historical overview of scoring systems--anatomical, physiological and combined systems and the advantages and disadvantages of each. (ii) Definitions used in official statistics--...