The existence and composition of Trauma Teams in the UK.

ABSTRACT

To determine the existence and composition of Trauma Teams in UK hospitals postal and telephone enquiries were made to 185 Accident & Emergency (A&E) departments comprising all those in the UK with an annual attendance of over 30,000 patients per year. The existence of Trauma Teams was not influenced by the number of A&E attendances or the medical staffing composition in the A&E department. Of the hospitals surveyed, 113 (61 per cent) had either a Trauma Team or an adequate system for getting A&E staff or other specialists rapidly to injured patients. The most common reason (58/69) for not having Trauma Teams was an inability to get doctors to attend to an injured patient promptly. In 58 out of the 69 hospitals the difficulties in getting the appropriate doctors to respond quickly to multiply injured patients was the main reason for not making any arrangements for rapid multidisciplinary evaluation of them. Changing the medical profession's attitude to injury management is a hurdle that will need to be overcome.