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May 2008
May is National Trauma Awareness Month
According to the American College of Surgeons Committee on Trauma injury is the leading cause of death for those one to 44 years old, and the leading cause of disability in the first four decades of life. Since 1980, trauma has killed more people from one - 34 years old in the United States than all diseases combined. Each year, approximately 90,000 people sustain injures serious enough to produce long-term disability. Motor vehicle crashes remain the leading cause of death from age five through 27 years. Trauma is recognized as a surgical disease and needs to be viewed in that context. The real tragedy in these statistics is that injury is preventable, diagnosable, treatable, survivable and controllable.
Addressing this national epidemic is a difficult one at best. One of the keys to successful prevention program is identifying the frequency, location and severity of local traumatic injury, and then working to provide focused educational outreach - an often time consuming and complicated process. With improving data collection systems, the ability to track trends in traumatic injury is getting less cumbersome and more accurate. With the American College of Surgeon’s verification designation of regional trauma centers, such as Marquette General Hospital, gathering statistics on injury trends through a national trauma data base is providing a better picture of where and how injuries are occurring, and who is most at risk. Although traumatic injury crosses all age groups, the youth population has a disproportionately higher percentage of injury, along with the elderly.
In our area, the most common causes of traumatic injury requiring admission to the MGHS Trauma Center in 2007 were:
· Motor Vehicle Collisions
· Falls at ground level and from height
· Recreational vehicles (snowmobiles, ATV's)
· Snowboarding
It is important to understand that traumatic injury is a community problem, and it takes community involvement to make a difference. The efforts of local and regional groups and agencies providing outreach education to help reduce injuries are constant and ongoing. Some of these include the UP Traffic Safety Committee, focusing on a host of traffic/highway safety issues across the Upper Peninsula; the UP Child Passenger Safety Coalition, focusing on safe transport of children, including the proper use of child vehicle restraints; along with Marquette-Alger SAFEKIDS and the Upper Peninsula Partnerships For Safety (UPPS), focusing on areas ranging from child passenger safety and bike/helmet safety to pedestrian safety.
Many individual agencies provide community safety education as part of their mission, such as the Learn Not to Burn Program provided to local schools by the Marquette City Fire Department. The Trauma Department at MGH, as well as the Women & Children’s Center, also provide a great deal of community injury prevention and safety awareness education throughout the region, ranging from fall prevention in the elderly to proper use of child restraints.
In addition to the ever-evolving realm of prevention, the treatment approach for the traumatically injured patient has improved significantly over the last few years. Providing the most competent and up-to-date emergency stabilization treatment in that critical “Golden Hour” of trauma care is crucial, and those who work in EMS are well rehearsed. It is foremost on the mind of every emergency responder that rolls up on a crash scene, responds to a fire, a farm accident, or any call that involves injury. Some community education outreach curriculum, such as the “First There-First Care” program offered through the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, teaches those in the community who may come upon a traumatically injured person basic lifesaving skills that could make a difference in survival.
The MGHS Emergency Department has made tremendous improvements in trauma care with its Level II Trauma Center designation. The organized trauma team response on arrival of the injured patient is making a positive impact.
Of the 674 trauma patients admitted to MGH in 2007, 277 (41 percent) of these were moderately injured patients, while 137 (20.3 percent) were severely injured. Ninety-two percent of these injuries were from blunt trauma with penetrating trauma accounting for 6.7 percent. With a survivability rate at MGH of 97.5 percent, it is higher than the national average for trauma centers of the same size, as reported by the National Trauma Data Base.
So as we recognize National Trauma Awareness Month, let’s do just that, become aware. Life is precious and we know it takes only seconds for that to change forever. Take some time to make yourself and your family aware of how to keep safety at the forefront. The life you save might very well be your own.
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