in our country injury and its related sequelae are major public health problems. organizations that are responsible for dealing with these issues must be familiar with the impact of it on national health status and resources to have prioritized their control strategies and also target trauma centers. injury is the 5th cause of death in the whole population and the 1st in the age first decades o...

Firearm violence is often framed as a problem of the inner cities and of the criminal justice system. However, this focus may direct attention away from smaller communities that also face firearm violence, including suicide. Ten years ago, the Firearm and Injury Center at Penn (FICAP) developed and implemented a model program in three smaller cities, using trauma centers to spearhead community ...

BACKGROUND Statistics from the National Trauma Data Bank imply that discretionary blood alcohol and urine drug testing is common. However, there is little evidence to determine which patients are appropriate for routine testing, based on information available at trauma center arrival. In 2002, Langdorf reported alcohol and illicit drug rates in Trauma Activation Patients. METHODOLOGY/PRINCIPA...

BACKGROUND Trauma resuscitations are high-pressure, time-critical events during which health care providers form ad hoc teams to rapidly assess and treat injured patients. Trauma team members experience varying levels of workload during resuscitations resulting from the objective demands of their role-specific tasks, the circumstances surrounding the event, and their individual previous experie...

With great interest we have read the excellent publication in the recent SMW from our dear colleagues Catherine Heim et al. from the University Hospital of Lausanne on trauma patients from their local registry [1]. Anyhow we would like to bring to your attention the last sentence of the introduction section, were the authors state the following: “To our knowledge, this is the first comprehensiv...

You are asked to be involved in organizing a trauma service for a major urban center. You are asked to make a decision on whether the services general approach to trauma in the city (which does have a well-established trauma center) will be scoop and run (minimal resuscitation at the scene with a goal to getting the patient to a trauma center as quickly as possible) or on-the-scene resuscitatio...

OBJECTIVE To assess spatial distribution of risks for work-related injuries controlled for nutritional variables and other covariables. METHODS Hospital-based spatial case-control study with work-related injuries spatial distribution as the main variable of interest. A total of 794 workers were selected between May and October 2004. Inclusion criteria for cases (N=263) were: worker with work-...

BACKGROUND Delays in both inter-hospital trauma transfers and disaster response are common. We hypothesized patient flow could be improved by formal adoption of systems that improve cooperation and communication. METHODS The regional trauma database of the Southwest Texas Regional Advisory Council for Trauma and the Regional Medical Operations Center (RMOC) database were queried to test the h...

INTRODUCTION Recent suicide bombings pose the novel problem for Trauma Centers of the massive simultaneous arrival of many gravely wounded patients. METHODS We report the experience of the French-German Military Trauma Group, a Level 2 Trauma Center, in Afghanistan during the wave of suicide bombings in February 2007. RESULTS Fourteen casualties were received. A first triage was carried out...

I Ludwig-Boltzmann Institute of Osteology, Hanusch Hospital of WGKK and AUVA Trauma Center Meidling, 4th Medical Department, Hanusch Hospital Vienna – Vienna, Austria. II Orthopaedic Hospital of Speising, Paediatric Department Vienna, Austria. Email: [email protected] Tel.: 00 43 1 91021 86924 OCCIPITO-VERTEBRAL DISSOCIATION IN CONNECTION WITH EXTENSIVE CERVICAL SPINE MALSEGMENTATION I...