Care of critically injured patients has evolved over the 50 years since Shoemaker established one of the first trauma units at Cook County Hospital in 1962. Modern trauma intensive care units offer a high nurse-to-patient ratio, physicians and midlevel providers who manage the patients, and technologically advanced monitors and therapeutic devices designed to optimize the care of patients. This...

BACKGROUND Trauma is one of the leading causes of mortality in developing countries. Nonspecialist doctors are the first caregivers to attend to trauma patients. Most nonspecialist doctors in Nigeria lack extra training in trauma care including the ATLS training for doctors. OBJECTIVES To determine the knowledge of the ATLS protocol among nonspecialist doctors involved in trauma care in Enugu...

No one could have imagined that when a light aircraft crashed in rural Nebraska in 1976, the nature of global trauma management would be forever altered. James Styner, an orthopaedic surgeon, was piloting the plane in question and the accident resulted in the death of his wife and serious injuries to himself and his four children. The standard of care that he and his family received in the loca...

The initial management of the polytrauma patient follows the Advanced Trauma Life Support (ATLS) practice of airway and cervical spine control, breathing and circulation. Assessment of injuries takes place initially in the form of a primary survey, during which time life-threatening injuries are excluded. This is followed by a secondary survey when a more detailed assessment of injuries is carr...

OBJECTIVE Given the recent emphasis on developing prehospital trauma care globally, we embarked upon a multicentre study to compare trauma patients' outcome within and between countries with technician-operated advanced life support (ALS) and physician-operated (Doc-ALS) emergency medical service (EMS) systems. These environments represent the continuum of prehospital care in high income countr...

Nurses are usually the first caregivers for cardiac arrest patients in an in-hospital environment, and subsequently partner with doctors in the further resuscitation of patients. The skills of basic life support are crucial for their practice. The Advanced Cardiac Life Support programme is traditionally geared toward training of medical staff in advanced resuscitation skills. The need for a bri...

The Ontario Prehospital Advanced Life Support Study represents the largest prehospital study yet conducted, worldwide. This study will involve more than 25,000 cardiac arrest, trauma, and critically ill patients over an 8-year period. The study will evaluate the incremental benefit of rapid defibrillation and prehospital Advanced Cardiac Life Support measures for cardiac arrest survival and the...

http://ccn.aacnjournals.org Kevin J. O’Connor is the director of organ donation services for the New England Organ Bank in Newton, Mass, and codirector of the Organ Transplantation Breakthrough Collaborative. Kenneth E. Wood is a professor of medicine and anesthesiology, Department of Medicine, and director of Critical Care Medicine/Respiratory Care and the Trauma and Life Support Center at the...

OBJECTIVE To estimate the incidence of limitations to Advanced Life Support in critically ill patients admitted to an intensive care unit with integrated palliative care. METHODS This retrospective cohort study included patients in the palliative care program of the intensive care unit of Hospital Paulistano over 18 years of age from May 1, 2011, to January 31, 2014. The limitations to Advanc...

background: cardiopulmonary-cerebral resuscitation (cpcr) training is essential for all hospital workers, especially junior residents who might become the manager of the resuscitation team. in our center, the traditional cpcr knowledge training curriculum for junior residents up to 5 years ago was lecture-based and had some faults. this study aimed to evaluate the effect of a problem-based meth...