STUDY SHOWS NEED FOR CO-OPERATION IN TRAUMA TREATMENT

ORTHOPOD is a multi-centre collaborative study investigating the performance of trauma services and the characteristics and distribution of injuries across the UK. It emerged out of growing concerns within the trauma community that injuries with recommended time-to-surgery windows were being missed and the delivery of trauma care within the nationalised health service was suboptimal.

The study ran for 10 consecutive weeks across 90 hospitals, including 23,138 general trauma cases and 709 weeks’ worth of theatre capacity entries. From that, two key pieces of work were produced.

The first paper described trauma performance in its generality. It highlighted significant variability in the delivery of trauma services, both operative demand and list provision. On average, 1.73 cases were completed per trauma theatre session. Those injuries associated with performance metrics and incentives, for example open and hip fractures, showed least variation and shortest time to surgery.

Patients waiting for surgery at the start of each week also fluctuated greatly within and between hospitals, highlighting an opportunity to develop intra-regional networks to better distribute trauma workload to effectively utilise all available trauma theatre capacity.

The second paper described day-case trauma services or lack thereof. Regular dedicated day-case trauma lists were rare – a national