The MTA continues to highlight the need for a coordinated trauma system that can deliver direct and timely access to established and properly resourced trauma teams, key investigations and interventions including early CT and well coordinated multidisciplinary rehabilitation as well as to promote injury prevention.
Major Trauma Audit National Report 2018
The MTA National Report focuses specifically on the most severely injured patients in the Irish healthcare system. It presents findings from MTA in 2018, and examines data from over 20,000 patients across 26 trauma receiving hospitals in Ireland.
The Major Trauma Audit (MTA) is a clinically led audit established by the National Office of Clinical Audit (NOCA) in 2013. This audit focuses on the care of the more severely injured trauma patients in our healthcare system. Since 2016, all 26 eligible hospitals have been participating in the audit and data have been collected on more than 20,000 trauma patients.
Key Recommendations
The MTA advocates for the implementation of the ‘Trauma System for Ireland’ strategy report as a matter of urgency and will provide data monitoring capacity to ensure the National Clinical Lead for Trauma Services and Trauma Review Implementation Group (TRIG) and Trauma Networks can monitor the system’s performance and react and prioritize resources appropriately.
The MTA continues to highlight the need for a multi-agency, multidisciplinary and coordinated strategy to address prevention and management of the most common mechanism of injury in Ireland: low falls.
Each hospital should have an active MTA hospital governance committee engaged in using the reports from this audit to actively engage in quality improvement and reduce the variation in performance across all hospital sites.
NOCA will conduct a survey of MTA hospital governance committees and will provide guidance and tools to support this.
NOCA will continue to work with hospitals to improve data quality e.g. matching patient cases that have been transferred from one hospital to another.
The MTA will progress the development of key data fields in order to capture meaningful data for rehabilitation in Ireland through the rehabilitation subcommittee and the MTA Governance Committee.
The MTA will continue to progress the development of longer-term outcome measures for the audit.