Introduction: The establishment of national trauma networks have resulted in significant benefits to injured patients. Older people are the majority of major trauma patients and there is need to study variations in care and performance against clinical metrics for them. We aim to describe this patient group in terms of injury, demographics, episode of care assessment and variation between component regions of the Major Trauma Network of England and Wales.
Method: The Trauma Audit and Research Network (TARN) database was analysed from April 2017 to March 2019. Patients aged 65 years and above with injury severity score (ISS) greater than eight were selected for analysis. Patients were compared by care pathway in terms of first and second treating hospitals and by demographics, injury mechanism, severity, physiology at arrival to hospital (including Glasgow Coma Score (GCS)) and mortality, where known, at discharge.
Results: Fifty-three thousand three hundred and forty-seven older injured patients (median age 82.5 years and 58.2% female), were treated in 165 hospitals within the 17 regional trauma networks over the two-year study period. Aside from GCS and gender, all other patient characteristics were significantly different between networks and specifically, a large variation between the network with the highest proportion of older patients (60.4%) and that with a preponderance of younger patients (40.2%) is seen. 84% of cases were due to a fall <2 m and 36.7% of cases had a brain injury. 73.5% of cases had one or more comorbidities.
Discussion: We have increased the understanding of how older patients contribute to and are managed by a national trauma service. We have demonstrated variation in numbers and patient characteristics throughout regional trauma networks. We have detailed the whole patient episode, allowing us to comment on disparities in management such as senior review and access to specialist clinical care settings. Older patients dominate United Kingdom major trauma and considerable variations and shortfalls have been identified. Work is needed to focus on the whole clinical episode for these patients both to improve outcome and patient experience but to also to ensure sustainable clinical care in a resource deplete era.
Keywords: Care pathway; Older major trauma; Traumatic brain injury.
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