Emergency traumatologists as partners in trauma care: the future is now.

Background: Decreasing manpower available to care for trauma patients both in and out of the ICU has led to a number of proposed solutions, including increasing involvement of emergency medicine-trained physicians in the care of these patients. We performed a descriptive comparative study in an effort to define the role of fellowship-trained emergency medicine physicians as full-time traumatologists.

Study Design: We performed a retrospective review of concurrent and prospectively collected data comparing process of care and outcomes for the resuscitative phase of trauma patients cared for by full-time fellowship-trained trauma surgeons (TS), a fellowship-trained emergency medicine physician (ET), and a first-year fellowship-trained trauma surgeon (TS1).

Results: Patient age, Revised Trauma Score, and Injury Severity Score were similar between groups. Process of care, defined by transfusion of uncrossmatched blood, prevalence of hypotension in patients receiving uncrossmatched blood, time spent in the emergency department, frequency of ICU admission, severity of injury for ICU admission, and time between emergency department and operating room for patients requiring surgery, was equivalent between groups. Outcomes evaluated by mortality and length of stay in the hospital and ICU did not differ between groups, and provider group was not predictive of mortality in stepwise logistic regression.

Conclusions: These data suggest that emergency traumatologists can provide trauma care effectively within a defined scope of practice and may provide an effective solution to manpower issues confronting trauma centers.