Trauma team activation criteria as predictors of patient disposition from the emergency department.

Unlabelled: Many trauma centers use mainly physiologic, first-tier criteria and mechanism-related, second-tier criteria to determine whether and at what level to activate a multidisciplinary trauma team in response to an out-of-hospital call. Some of these criteria result in a large number of unnecessary team activations while identifying only a few additional patients who require immediate operative intervention.

Objectives: To separately evaluate the incremental predictive value of individual first-tier and second-tier trauma team activation criteria for severe injury as reflected by patient disposition from the emergency department (ED).