Study of trauma patients in the emergency department of a tertiary care hospital in north India during covid 19 pandemic

Abstract

Aim :Trauma is an increasing cause of morbidity and mortality in India.This study was done to improve the understanding of the mode of trauma, severity of injuries, and outcome of trauma victims in our hospital during covid 19 pandemic with 6 months study, of which 3 months is of locked down period and 3 month is of unlocked period.Materials and Methods:This was a retrospective observational study of all trauma patients presenting to our emergency department(ED). Details of incident, injuries,and outcome were noted.Results:The ED attended to 5214 patients during the 6 month study period.The gender distribution was 64.6% males and35.36% females.The median duration from timeof incident to time of arrival to the ED was 3h (interquartile range[IQR]: 1.5–6.5) for priority one patients, 3h (IQR:1.5–7.7) for priority two patients, and 1.5h (IQR:1–7) for priority three patients. Road traffic accident (RTA) (63.4%) was the most common mode of injury, followed by fall on level ground (7.6%) of patients while13.3% had polytrauma with two wheeler accidents contributing to the majority. Most of the patients were of age group between 18-40 and most of patients 3080/5214(59%) were from orthopaedic department followed by neurosurgery department 1790/ 5214(34.3%). The ED team alone managed 55.85% of patients while the remaining 44.2% required evaluation and treatment by the trauma surgical teams.Conclusion: RTA (road traffic accidents) and falls are the predominant causes of trauma. Asimple physiological variable based scoring system such as the revised traum a score may beused to prioritize patients with polytrauma.