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FeedThe Drama of Trauma
The mortality rate for critically injured trauma victims continues to fall, thanks to the state’s ever-improving Inclusive Trauma System.
By Reid Champagne Published April 9, 2010 at 09:18 AM
(page 1 of 3)
A fight in the parking lot of a Milford bar leaves a young man lying on the asphalt, his throat slit. His friends rush him to Bayhealth Milford Memorial.The Bayhealth trauma team is paged immediately. It quickly evaluates the patient’s condition, then begins treatments as he is wheeled to the operating room.
By the time the patient arrives in surgery, the trauma team has restored his airway and stopped the bleeding that had left his blood pressure and heart rate dangerously low. In the operating room, the surgical team is already prepped to repair the bleeding blood vessel.
After a successful surgery, the patient is stabilized, then transported to a Level I trauma facility, where he continues to improve and, finally, is discharged.
Milford Memorial is a Level III trauma facility, part of what is formally known as an Inclusive Trauma System in Delaware. Inclusive means all eight hospitals in the state belong to the system. Each provides resources to achieve one of the four levels of care required to qualify as a trauma facility. Delaware is one of only a handful of states with such a system.
“With his throat slit the way it was, that patient would most certainly have died had he not been in the close proximity of a Level III trauma facility,” says Dr. Pam Demnicki, a surgeon and trauma director for Bayhealth Milford Memorial who repaired that patient’s blood vessel that evening.
Because Delaware’s trauma system is inclusive, we are all blessed to live near enough to some level of trauma care to have a positive outcome if critically injured. This is reassuring. Considered as a disease, trauma kills more people under the age of 40 each year than cancer and heart attacks combined.
And Delaware’s trauma care system may be the best of the best. “No other state has the integration we have from border to border,” says Dr. Edward L. Alexander, director of trauma service for Bayhealth Kent General. He points to mortality rates from trauma in Delaware that are consistently below the national average.
“In trauma there is a principle known as the Golden Hour, where you have approximately one hour to restore resuscitation to a patient before death occurs,” Alexander says. “In Delaware, we routinely beat that hour.”
Page 2: The Drama of Trauma, continues...
