The initial assessment and management of seriously injured patients is a challenging task and requires a rapid and systematic approach. Injuries causing this mortality occur in predictable patterns and recognition of these patterns led to the development of advanced trauma life support (ATLS) by the American College of Surgeons, and standardized protocol for trauma patient evaluation has been developed. Different systems of trauma scoring have been developed. This study was conducted out of the need for unified scale to assess polytrauma patients from the moment patient are admitted in, till when discharged from Intensive Care Unit (ICU), so we compared the accuracy of few scoring systems in predicting mortality rate in polytrauma patients, and then assessed the cost-effectiveness applying these methods, and how much are these applicable. Here we chose 3 scoring systems: Glasgow Coma scale (GCS), Revised Trauma score (RTS) and Acute Physiology and Chronic Health Evaluation II scales (APACHE II). APACHE II system proved to be helpful in giving primary impression about case prognosis, and overall it reflects the quality level provided in the facility which is providing the health care for the polytraumatized patients, and it can be used as unified scale to compare the healthcare results and outcomes in different hospitals. APACHE II can be considered to be a largely accurate and applicable system for the polytraumatized patients but the association between three of scores offers better results about predicting prognosis of these patients.
Keywords: intensive care unit; polytrauma; severity scores.