Revised Trauma Scale

Excerpt

Treating trauma patients requires stringent planning and therapeutic resource allocation to provide optimal levels of care for injured patients. A standardized rapid assessment model assists with triaging injured patients and provides a standardized process that can be applied across different settings to ensure similar treatment decisions are made pertaining to a patient’s level of care. Multiple assessment tools exist and are available now, but the Trauma Score (TS) was initially developed to represent an injured patient’s injury severity accurately. The TS was designed to assist with field triage to reduce the risk of overtriage, which can contribute to the high cost of regional trauma care or undertriage, which can put injured patients at higher risk for mortality. Components of the TS include respiratory rate, respiratory effort, systolic blood pressure, capillary refill time, and the Glasgow Coma Scale (GCS). Researchers found that adding the respiratory rate and systolic blood pressure to the TS increased attending physicians’ suitability of the tool to assist in triaging injured patients. Multiple studies have already verified the reliability, reproducibility, and effectiveness of the TS.