The Traumatic Coma Data Bank: a nursing perspective, Part I.

The Traumatic Coma Data Bank (TCDB) was a collaborative project undertaken to study the nature and causes of severe head injury, allowing patients similar in age, severity of insults and neurological and physical symptoms to be compared in terms of outcome. Systematic uniform data were collected during the prehospital, acute and rehabilitative phases on 581 patients from 6 centers during the pilot phase of the TCDB, June 1, 1979 through May 31, 1982. The pilot phase successfully determined that a collaborative approach to studying head injury was feasible and additional information gained was incorporated into the main phase April, 1983 through April, 1988. A description of the TCDB population as of this writing (730 patients) is included here.