Trauma: A Comprehensive Emergency Medicine Approach

Book Preface

Traumatic injuries, both intentionally inflicted and unintentional, have major health consequences worldwide. Although primarily a disease of younger adults, its morbidity and mortality are increasingly severe at the extremes of age. Expert multidisciplinary trauma care is recognized as the most important determinant of survival. This concept has far reaching implications for medical education, public health, public policy, economics, and research.

There are a number of very fine textbooks on trauma that the student and experienced clinician can reference. However, the overwhelming majority of those texts are written primarily from a surgical perspective; they detail the resuscitation, operative management, and intensive care of trauma patients.

Emergency physicians with proficiency in trauma management are crucial elements in initial approach to these trauma patients. Furthermore, there are many traumatic injuries treated in the emergency department by emergency physicians and nurses; outpatient follow up may be performed by a variety of specialists after the initial visit. Less tends to be written about these patients yet they consume the majority of trauma care provided in emergency departments.

We have assembled over eighty authorities in emergency trauma care to craft a comprehensive reference for all practitioners called upon to provide care for patients with emergency presentations of traumatic injuries. While specifically targeted at practicing emergency physicians, emergency medicine residents in training, physician assistants, nurse practitioners, and emergency nurses will find that this text provides insights and assistance for their trauma management.

In addition, the surgical trauma specialist will glean insights that are topical and useful about care in the emergency department. The internist and family practitioner who may evaluate minor trauma in the office will benefit from discussions on ways to manage minor trauma, expedite care of their patients, and understand which patients may require more emergent care and the resources available in emergency departments.

Although primarily authored by emergency physicians, multiple consultants and subspecialists lent their expertise to this book, affirming that trauma is truly a “team sport” that often requires efforts of multiple specialties to attain optimal outcomes.

This text covers aspects of trauma care from resuscitation procedures to implications for rural settings, from disaster preparedness to trauma in special populations, from medical concerns in the trauma patient to professionalism, communications, and interpersonal issues. The authors in this book are clinicians, teachers, writers, researchers, and administrators renowned as the experts in modern trauma care in the emergency department.