Improving major trauma triage

Clinicians in Southampton are evaluating a tool used by ambulance crews to decide on the most appropriate hospital destination for patients involved in traumatic incidents.

The tool, which was introduced in 2012 in line with the Wessex Trauma Network (WTN), categorises all hospitals in the Wessex region into trauma units, local  emergency hospitals and the major trauma centre, depending on their services, and also includes all ambulance services in the region.

Used as an electronic app or a printed flow diagram, the service assists paramedics to triage emergency patients and determine the most suitable WTN hospital for treatment.

Created to improve care for patients with severe injuries, the WTN ensures that the most severely injured patients can be managed in a centre equipped to provide all of the required specialist services. Southampton General Hospital is the major trauma centre for the region, accepting patients from across the area, even if there is a closer emergency department.

Improving accuracy

Now, six years later, clinical-academics are reviewing the system’s capabilities in order to make improvements to the service.

Els Freshwater, consultant paramedic at University Hospital Southampton NHS Foundation Trust, is leading the evaluation of the tool to understand how it can be improved and developed further.

It is hoped that improvements will increase better on-the-spot assessments and allow paramedics and teams to make more informed decisions based on each patient’s specific needs. Better accuracy will also reduce the need for transfers between units after patients have been admitted, which will in turn save resources and improve patient care.

Freshwater plans to use data collected from 1 October 2016 to 30 September 2017. Information will be obtained from Southampton General Hospital’s emergency department records and Trauma Audit Research Network data and will be used to identify;

• the location of each incident
• the type of injuries
• the vital signs at the scene.

 Opting out

If you were taken by ambulance or air ambulance to Southampton General Hospital with traumatic injuries between 1 October 2016 and 30 September 2017, anonymised data from your health records may be used in the analysis in this study.

If you would prefer for your data not to be used in this study, please email els.freshwater@uhs.nhs.uk