Prehospital Report (vs Triage?)

[Bob Waddell II]

I have the OBVIOUS conflict of interest - see my signature.

I personally whole heartily agree with the discussion, the issues which I
feel are blatantly being ignored or specifically denied are where's the
evidence?  We proclaim to be working towards evidence based Prehospital and
Emergency Medicine, yet it appears we selectively choose which, what, and
who's evidence meets our needs at which or what time we choose to use it.
Is triage in the US a process by which we simply move the victims from the
original scene to somewhere else, i.e. the hospital and make the victims
someone else's problem or is it about increasing the patient survival
potential within the resources available?  Reducing the chaos and
housecleaning is easy, make it some one else's problem and fault; we're
extremely good at that.

With two foreign wars and 10's of thousands of wounded soldiers being
treated at all levels of trauma care, with war zone like streets in the US
and 10's of thousands of civilians being treated at all levels of trauma
care, with numerous honest researchers studying (at least parts of) the
issues one would think we look at the evidence being analyzed and the true
reality, our patients.  Besides it being my day job, I am disappointed that
ego's, personal preferences, old dynasties, laziness, and the age old "smoke
and mirror games" are not put to the same scrutiny of increasing patient
survival that other, less heroic aspects of health care are.

Purely my personal opinions

Take care, 
  
Bob 
  
Robert K. Waddell II 
Vice President - 
Emergency Preparedness and Response 
"The Sacco Triage Methodology" 
ThinkSharp, Inc 
  
Wyoming Office: 
1302 East 5th Avenue 
Cheyenne, Wyoming 82001 
(307) 920 - 2020 cell 

bwaddell at sharpthinkers.com 
or bobwaddell at bresnan.net 
www.sharpthinkers.com