J Trauma
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Febrile trauma patients have repeated blood cultures drawn during a prolonged hospitalization. We examined the diagnostic yield of blood cultures in severely injured patients to determine whether concurrent antimicrobial therapy or prophylactic administration of antibiotics affects blood culture growth. We also determined how rapidly growth changed to determine whether total numbers of blood cultures could be decreased. The hypotheses of the study were that concurrent antimicrobial administration affects blood culture yield, prophylactic administration alters the culture result, and repetitive culturing is unnecessary. ⋯ Concurrent antimicrobial administration does not alter blood culture yield. Prophylactic administration alters the type of organism cultured. Little new information is gained from repetitive culturing.
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The clinical significance of myocardial contusion (MC) following blunt thoracic trauma is still unknown. Accordingly, in this prospective study in a regional trauma center we investigated the acute and long-term clinical significance of MC. ⋯ The incidence of 19.7% of MC in our patients with blunt chest injury requiring intensive care treatment indicates that this condition is frequent in polytraumatized patients. Outcome and prognosis in patients with MC is favorable and, thus, routine cardiac work-up is not indicated. Specific diagnostic and therapeutic measures should be limited to cases where cardiac complications develop.
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To study the impact of helmet nonuse in motorcycle crashes after the repeal of a mandatory helmet law in the state of Florida. ⋯ The repeal of a motorcycle helmet law significantly increased the number and severity of brain injuries admitted to our trauma center.
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Evaluating the medical staff workload during resuscitation of trauma patients is one of the important quality assurance activities to provide adequate medical manpower, especially for patients with life-threatening or severe injuries. Nevertheless, there is no method available to measure and calculate the amount of workload during resuscitation. We sought to develop a new framework of Workload Scoring System (WSS) to evaluate and quantify the medical staff workload during resuscitation. ⋯ WSS provides a valuable tool to measure and quantify the medical staff workload during resuscitation as a function of -8.920 + 1.375 ISS + 1.785 RTS + 0.424 Age. The greatest benefit of this methodology is to forecast the expected medical staff workload to allocate sufficient medical manpower to provide the desired trauma care.