An Assessment of Casualties Undergoing Delayed Surgical Intervention in the Combat Setting.

Introduction: The US military is transitioning into a posture preparing for large-scale combat operations in which delays in evacuation may become common. It remains unclear which casualty population can have their initial surgical interventions delayed, thus reducing the evacuation demands.

Methods: We performed a secondary analysis of a previously described dataset from the Department of Defense Trauma Registry (DODTR) focused on casualties who received prehospital care.