Motor vehicle injuries, falls are primary causes of trauma
Key findings from the 2004 NTDB annual report
Nearly half (48.5 percent) of all the cases in the American College of Surgeons’ National Trauma Data Bank (NTDB) are due to motor vehicle-related injuries. Falls account for 16.7 percent of cases. These are among the key findings in the NTDB 2004 Annual Report, an updated analysis of the largest aggregation of trauma registry data ever assembled.
The NTDB contains more than 1.1 million records from 405 trauma centers in 43 states, territories and the District of Columbia. The American College of Surgeons (ACS) is working with the Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA) to develop a national minimum trauma care data set. The two groups also are developing a national sample so trauma researchers can make inferences about a trauma population when using NTDB data for analyses.
This year’s report was released at the start of the American Association for the Surgery of Trauma’s 2004 annual meeting. It confirmed that injuries sustained in motor vehicle accidents still account for the majority of traumatic injuries treated in U.S. trauma centers.
Key findings
Key findings in the 2004 NTDB Report include:
• The largest number of trauma-related deaths are caused by motor vehicle traffic-related injuries (49 percent), followed by firearm injuries (19 percent) and falls (14 percent).
• Teenagers (14-19 years old) have the highest number of motor vehicle-related injuries.
• Injuries involving firearms account for 5.4 percent of cases in the data bank and increase dramatically from ages 12 to 20 years old.
• Falls account for 16.7 percent of cases reported to the NTDB, with the incidence of falls peaking around 82 years of age. Falls are associated with the second largest number of hospital and intensive care unit days.
• Up to age 70, men make up the majority of trauma patients; however, after age 70 most patients treated for traumatic injury are women.
• Self-pay is the largest single payment category (20.59 percent), followed by managed care (14.3 percent), and Medicare (13.48 percent).
What is the NTDB?
The 2004 NTDB Annual Report was created to inform the medical community, the public and decision makers about a wide variety of issues that characterize the current state of care for injured persons in the United States. In addition to providing information about what types of traumatic injuries result in the most fatalities, the report also examines traumatic injury variations by age and gender, as well as hospital length of stay related to the mechanism of injury and source-of-payment issues.
The NTDB is committed to being the non-proprietary national repository for trauma center registry data. An estimated 55 percent of Level I and 37 percent of Level II trauma centers in the United States contribute data to the NTDB. The goal is to receive data on every patient treated in every trauma center in the United States, so that care of the injured patient can be improved from initial treatment through rehabilitation and injury prevention efforts.