Is mortality all it's cracked up to be after injury?

摘要

The analysis by Gorra and colleagues provides important information regarding the ability to predict 30-day postinjury mortality using information known at the time of hospital discharge. The authors should be commended for providing a well-articulated study and appropriate background to the ongoing controversy of what should be used as the primary outcome measure to quantify or benchmark the quality of care a trauma center provides relative to "other" trauma centers. This article is timely because the American College of Surgeons Committee on Trauma has initiated the Trauma Quality Improvement Program, which will attempt to improve the quality of trauma care across centers by using risk-adjusted benchmarking methods.1 Of interest, one of the program's primary outcomes to be used will be in-hospital mortality.