Relative Mortality Analysis Of The “Golden Hour”: A Comprehensive Acuity Stratification Approach To Address Disagreement In Current Literature

Abstract

Objective: This study sought to address the disagreement in literature regarding the “golden hour” in trauma by using the Relative Mortality Analysis to overcome previous studies’ limitations in accounting for acuity when evaluating the impact of prehospital time on mortality.

Methods: The previous studies that failed to support the “golden hour” suffered from limitations in their efforts to account for the confounding effects of patient acuity on the relationship between prehospital time and mortality in their trauma populations. The Relative Mortality Analysis was designed to directly address these limitations using a novel acuity stratification approach, based on patients’ probability of survival (PoS), a comprehensive triage metric calculated using Trauma and Injury Severity Score methodology. For this analysis, the population selection and analysis methods of these previous studies were compared to the Relative Mortality Analysis on how they capture the relationship between prehospital time and mortality in the University of Virginia (UVA) Trauma Center population.

Results: The methods of the previous studies that failed to support the “golden hour” also failed to do so when applied to the UVA Trauma Center population. However, when applied to the same population, the Relative Mortality Analysis identified a subgroup, 9.9% (with a PoS 23%–91%), of the 5,063 patient population with significantly lower mortality when transported to the hospital within 1 hour, supporting the “golden hour.”

Conclusion: These results suggest that previous studies failed to support the “golden hour” not due to a lack of patients significantly impacted by prehospital time within their trauma populations, but instead due to limitations in their efforts to account for patient acuity. As a result, these studies inappropriately rejected the “golden hour,” leading to the current disagreement in literature regarding the relationship between prehospital time and trauma patient mortality. The Relative Mortality Analysis was shown to overcome the limitations of these studies and demonstrated that the “golden hour” was significant for patients who were not low acuity (PoS >91%) or severely high acuity (PoS <23%).

Key words:

• emergency medical services
• golden hour
• prehospital time
• transportation
• trauma