Trauma reception and team roles

Overview

Effective trauma teams have been shown to improve patient outcomes by having early senior decision makers involved in direct patient care. The trauma team leader is a clinician who provides the overall supervision and direction to the trauma resuscitation, with input from the team members.  

Understanding of trauma triage, local trauma protocols, evidence based clinical care and delivery of trauma resuscitation will aid the trauma team leader in delivering co-ordinated trauma care (Hargestam et al, 2016).  

Trauma team members play an important role in delivering accurate, timely information to the team leader using closed loop communication processes (Georgiou & Lockey, 2010). These multidisciplinary teams may have varying members from emergency, anaesthetics, surgery and ICU. In addition, many teams comprise of pharmacists, radiographers, runners, administration staff and specialist trauma nursing staff in addition to the emergency nursing team.  

Description

This resource kit provides healthcare clinicians with knowledge and skills to effectively manage a multidisciplinary trauma team.

Learning objectives

By the end of this session the participant will be able to:

• Identify roles and responsibilities in trauma team activation and mobilisation
• Effectively manage a multidisciplinary team 
• Perform the initial reception and primary management in a trauma presentation  

Downloads

Further reading