Citation

Kahn C. Ann. Emerg. Med. 2009; 54(4): 604-605.

Affiliation

Department of Emergency Medicine, University of California-Irvine, Irvine, CA, USA.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2009, American College of Emergency Physicians, Publisher Elsevier Publishing)

DOI

10.1016/j.annemergmed.2009.08.007

PMID

19769889

Abstract

I cannot see a fatally injured child in my trauma center without feeling my small share of the terrible grief that child's parents are just starting to discover. No matter what the mechanism, no matter how unintentional the injury, I always find myself in a group of emergency department and trauma staff trying to cope with a deceptively simple question: how could this happen?

After several years of dealing with the consequences of injuries, many emergency physicians start to wonder how they, just one person afloat in a sea of injured victims, can truly start to make a difference. Rather than merely rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic, as a colleague of mine is fond of saying, perhaps the answer is in preventing that crash in the first place.

Language: en