Citation

Zehtabchi S, Nishijima DK, McKay MP, Clay Mann N. Acad. Emerg. Med. 2011; 18(6): 637-643.

Affiliation

Department of Emergency Medicine, Downstate Medical Center and Kings County Hospital (SZ), Brooklyn, NY; the Department of Emergency Medicine, University of California at Davis (DKN), Sacramento, CA; the Department of Emergency Medicine, George Washington University Hospital (MPM), Washington, DC; and the University of Utah School of Medicine, Intermountain Injury Control Research Center (NCM), Salt Lake City, UT.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2011, Society for Academic Emergency Medicine, Publisher John Wiley and Sons)

DOI

10.1111/j.1553-2712.2011.01083.x

PMID

21676063

Abstract

Trauma registries have been designed to serve a number of purposes, including quality improvement, injury prevention, clinical research, and policy development. Since their inception over 30 years ago, there are increasingly more institutions with trauma registries, many of which submit data to a national trauma registry. The goal of this review is to describe the history, logistics, and characteristics of trauma registries and their contribution to emergency medicine and trauma research. Discussed in this review are the limitations of trauma registries, such as variability in quality and type of the collected data, absence of data pertaining to long-term and functional outcomes, prehospital information, and complications as well as other methodologic obstacles limiting the utility of registry data in clinical and epidemiologic research.

Language: en