查看文章

The infrastructure provided by mature trauma systems has facilitated timely delivery of specialized care to the critically injured. What were once universally fatal injuries are now identified and treated rapidly in trauma centres, resulting in increased survival rates. However, opportunities exist to prevent more deaths through the optimization of prehospital care1. The trimodal distribution of death following major trauma, consisting of immediate (within 1h of injury), early (within hours of injury) and late (within several weeks of injury) deaths, has been replaced in mature trauma systems by a unimodal distribution. The majority of deaths occur in the first several hours after injury, predominantly from haemorrhage and brain injury2. These observations highlight the need to focus on immediate postinjury care. The elimination of immediate and early trauma deaths requires rapid identification of imminently life-threatening …