Prehospital trauma care evolution, practice and controversies: need for a review

Abstract

Modern medicine and surgery is historically very recent, and most interventions that are so commonly done in a hospital now are only 60 to 70 years old. Understanding of emergency care of the injured is more recent; however, for the sake of temporal convenience trauma care has become compartmentalized into phases: first aid, bystander care, prehospital care, emergency care, definitive levels of care and rehabilitation. The injured patient’s body physiology is changing continuously from the time of the impact at the injury site.. The outcome of trauma is dependent not only on what is done in the prehospital phase but also on hospital care and rehabilitation. Our understanding of the changes and the response to interventions in a trauma patient has been evolving over the years. This paper discusses the need to review recent advances in our understanding of the care process and how we need to improve it and how there is a pressing need to generate valid evidence on what we do in emergency care.

Keywords:

• Trauma care
• emergency care
• ATLS
• prehospital care
• trauma system
• ambulance
• first aid
• BLS
• ALS
• tranexamic acid
• scoop and run

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_K._Styner

2 http://bulletin.facs.org/2018/06/atls-10th-edition-offers-new-insights-into-managing-trauma-patients/.

3 https://www.facs.org/quality-programs/trauma/atls/about.

4 http://www.dgu-online.de/fileadmin/published_content/5.Qualitaet_und_Sicherheit/PDF/20110720_S3_LL_Polytrauma_DGU_eng_f.pdf

5 https://www.who.int/emergencycare/publications/trauma-care-checklist.pdf?ua=1