Developing Australia's first statewide trauma registry: what are the lessons?

Trauma registries, like disease registries, provide an important analysis tool to assess the management of patient care. Trauma registries are well established and relatively common in the USA and have been used to change legislation, promote trauma prevention and to evaluate trauma system effectiveness. In Australia, the first truly statewide trauma registry was established in Victoria in 2001 with an estimated capture of 1700 major trauma cases annually. The Victorian State Trauma Registry, managed by the Victorian State Trauma Outcomes Registry and Monitoring (VSTORM) group, was established in response to a ministerial review of trauma and emergency services undertaken in 1997 to advise the Victorian Government on a best practice model of trauma service provision that was responsive to the particular needs of critically ill trauma patients. This taskforce recommended the establishment of a new system of care for major trauma patients in Victoria and a statewide trauma registry to monitor this new system. The development of the Victorian state trauma registry has shown that there are certain issues that must be resolved for successful implementation of any system‐wide registry. This paper describes the issues faced by VSTORM in developing, implementing and maintaining a statewide trauma registry.

[1]  C. Finch,et al.  The status of the Glasgow Coma Scale. , 2003, Emergency medicine.

[2]  B. Gabbe,et al.  TRISS: does it get better than this? , 2004, Academic emergency medicine : official journal of the Society for Academic Emergency Medicine.

[3]  P. Laake,et al.  Reporting data following major trauma and analysing factors associated with outcome using the new Utstein style recommendations. , 2001, Resuscitation.

[4]  H. Gelfand,et al.  An Evaluation of the Illinois Trauma Registry: The Completeness of Case Reporting , 1980, Medical care.

[5]  Janice Klym.  Trauma center designation , 1983 .

[6]  F. T. de Dombal,et al.  The hit and miss of ISS and TRISS. Yorkshire Trauma Audit Group. , 1993, BMJ.

[7]  J. Sampalis,et al.  Trauma Center Designation , 1994 .

[8]  R. Taylor,et al.  The major trauma management study: an analysis of the efficacy of current trauma care. , 1998, The Australian and New Zealand journal of surgery.

[9]  S. Shackford,et al.  The effect of regionalization upon the quality of trauma care as assessed by concurrent audit before and after institution of a trauma system: a preliminary report. , 1986, The Journal of trauma.

[10]  P. Lane,et al.  An evaluation of patient outcomes before and after trauma center designation using Trauma and Injury Severity Score analysis. , 1995, The Journal of trauma.

[11]  S. Cordner,et al.  Quality assessment of the management of road traffic fatalities at a level I trauma center compared with other hospitals in Victoria, Australia. Consultative Committee on Road Traffic Fatalities in Victoria. , 1998, The Journal of trauma.

[12]  M Keegan,et al.  National survey of state trauma registries--1992. , 1993, The Journal of trauma.

[13]  E J MacKenzie,et al.  Review of evidence regarding trauma system effectiveness resulting from panel studies. , 1999, The Journal of trauma.

[14]  J. Sloan,et al.  The hit and miss of ISS and TRISS , 1994 .

[15]  C. Mock,et al.  Systematic review of trauma system effectiveness based on registry comparisons. , 1999, The Journal of trauma.

[16]  E. Garthe.  Overview of trauma registries in the United States. , 1997, Journal of AHIMA.

[17]  Mervyn Susser.  Epidemiology in Health Care Planning: A Guide to the Uses of a Scientific Method , 1980 .

[18]  D. Clark.  Development of a statewide trauma registry using multiple linked sources of data. , 1993, Proceedings. Symposium on Computer Applications in Medical Care.

[19]  C N Mock,et al.  Systematic review of published evidence regarding trauma system effectiveness. , 1999, The Journal of trauma.

[20]  H. Champion,et al.  The Major Trauma Outcome Study: establishing national norms for trauma care. , 1990, The Journal of trauma.

[21]  R. Rutledge.  The Injury Severity Score is unable to differentiate between poor care and severe injury. , 1996, The Journal of trauma.

[22]  R. Rutledge.  The goals, development, and use of trauma registries and trauma data sources in decision making in injury. , 1995, The Surgical clinics of North America.