Pre-hospital Notification of Injured Patients Presenting to Trauma Centres in India

This is a longitudinal prospective cohort study of injured patients being transported by ambulance to the major trauma centre study sites. In the pre-intervention phase, prospective data on patients will be collected on pre-hospital assessment, notification, in-hospital assessment, management and outcomes and recorded in a new tailored multi-hospital trauma registry. All injured patients arriving by ambulance and allocated to a red or yellow priority category will be eligible for inclusion. The intervention will be a pre-hospital notification application in the form of an Android program that will be used by ambulance clinicians to notify emergency departments of selected hospitals of an impending arrival of a patient. The application will use a simple algorithm based on trauma triage principles developed by the Australia-India Trauma System Collaboration (AITSC). The proportion of severely injured patients arriving to hospital after notification will be the primary outcome measure with a target of 70%. Secondary outcomes evaluated will be availability of a trauma cubicle, presence of a trauma team on patient arrival, time to first chest x-ray and in-hospital mortality.