Recommendations for uniform reporting of data following major trauma--the Utstein Style: an initiative. International Trauma Anaesthesia and Critical Care Society (ITACCS).

UNLABELLED: Basic and advanced care of trauma patients always has been an important aspect of prehospital and immediate in-hospital Emergency Medicine, involving a broad spectrum of disciplines, specialties, and skills delivered through Emergency Medical Services Systems which, however, may differ significantly in structure, resources, and operation. This complex background, at least in part, has hindered the development of a uniform pattern or set of criteria and definitions. This in turn, has rendered data incompatible, with the consequence that such differing systems or protocols of care cannot be evaluated or compared readily with acceptable validity. Guided by previous consensus processes evolved by the ERC, the AHA, and other International Organisations represented in ILCOR--on Uniform Reporting of Data following Out-of-hospital and In-hospital Cardiac Arrest--the Utstein Style, an international working group of ITACCS, has drafted a document, Recommendations for Uniform Reporting of Data following Major Trauma--the Utstein Style. The reporting system is based on the following considerations: 1) A structured reporting system based on an "Utstein style template" that would permit the compilation of data and statistics on major trauma care, facilitating and validating independent or comparative audit of performance, and quality of care (and enable groups to challenge performance statistics that did not take account of all relevant information); 2) The Recommendations and Template should encompass both out-of-hospital and in-hospital trauma care; 3) The Recommendations and Template should permit further intra- and inter-system evaluation to improve the quality of delivered care and identification of the relative benefits of different systems and innovative initiatives; and 4) The Template should facilitate studies setting out to improve epidemiological understanding of trauma; for example, such studies might focus on the factors that determine survival. The document is structured along the lines of the original Utstein Style Guidelines publication on "prehospital cardiac arrest". It includes a glossary of terms used in the prehospital and early hospital phase as definitions, time points, and time intervals. The document uses an almost identical scheme for illustrating the different process time clocks--one for the patient, one for the dispatch centre, one for the ambulance, and finally, one for the hospital. For clarity, data should be reported as core data (i.e., always obtained) and optional data (obtained under specific circumstances). In contrast to the graphic approach used for the Utstein Template for pre- or in-hospital cardiac arrest, respectively, the present Template introduces, for the time being, at least, a number of terms and definitions and a semantic rather than a graphic report form. The document includes the following sections: I.

INTRODUCTION AND BACKGROUND: II.

TRAUMA DATA STRUCTURE DEVELOPMENT: A general outline of the development of structured data using object-oriented modelling (which will be discussed in due course) and includes a set of explanatory illustrations; III.

TERMS AND DEFINITIONS: Outlines terms and definitions in trauma care, describing different types of trauma (blunt, penetrating, long bone, major/combined, multiple/polytrauma, and predominant trauma); IV.

FACTORS RELATING TO THE CIRCUMSTANCES OF THE INJURY: Describes the following items: a) Cause of injury e.g., type of injury (blunt or penetrating), burns, cold, crush, laceration, amputation, radiation, multiple, etc.; b) Severity of Injury--e.g., prehospital basic abbreviated injury score developed by the working group. The score contains anatomical and physiological disability data, with the anatomical scale ranging ordinally from "1" = head to "9" = external; the physiological disability scale ranges ordinally from "0"; c) Mechanism of injury--recording for transportation incidents etc; e.g., the type of impact, possible restraining devices,