A group of professionals working together toward a common goal in a high-pressure environment – sounds like a sports team, right?
The trauma team at your local hospital in many ways operates like your favorite sports team. However, in these situations, the stakes are truly life and death.
A trauma care team includes physicians, nurses, and other specialists, all of whom have specific roles in the patient care process. Those team members need to execute their roles to achieve the best patient results.
The Starters: Core Members of A Trauma Critical Care Team
When first responders bring a patient into the emergency department, a team converges to begin the resuscitation and stabilization process. They work together to stop any bleeding, take preliminary scans, start IVs, set up airways, and more.
Attending physicians: Two attendings – one who oversees the emergency department, and another responsible for trauma – act as the co-captains of the process. The trauma attending is a surgeon who manages the patient from the trauma side and is responsible for care in the trauma bay and beyond. The emergency attending is always present in the emergency department and is responsible for all the patients there, trauma or not.
The two attendings work in tandem in trauma cases. If the trauma attending is unavailable when the patient comes in, the emergency attending oversees the case until the trauma attending is available.
Trauma chief resident: Usually a doctor training to be a surgeon, the trauma chief resident helps to oversee the care in the trauma bay.
Residents: Residents are team leaders who help to oversee care and assign actions. In a teaching hospital like UPMC, a trauma resident isn’t necessarily training to become a surgeon. They could be someone from a different specialty doing a trauma rotation. Interns are more junior than residents, but they also are active participants in trauma care. Medical students usually are involved only as observers, although they may also be involved in patient care under direct supervision of a physician.
Nurses: There are two primary nurses in the emergency department. The charge nurse records everything happening in the resuscitative phase. The primary nurse is responsible for patients: getting them on the monitor, taking the first set of vital signs, making sure IVs are running, getting blood work, and more.
Emergency department technicians: Also known as advanced patient care technicians, people in this role assist with a wide variety of tasks. Technicians are trained to start IVs, read monitors, draw blood, put in catheters, and more. They take their direction from nurses.
X-ray technicians: They work around the trauma team and take initial x-ray scans.
Anesthesiologists: They can come down from the operating room to help with airways and intubation, if needed.
CT technicians: They can quickly scan the patient’s body via a computed tomography (CT) scan to see what injuries there might be, including internal injuries that might not be visible upon exam.
A Deep Bench: The Breadth of Your Trauma Team
Although trauma care begins in the emergency department, the breadth of the trauma team extends well beyond those walls. Trauma care can begin with paramedics. After the emergency room, the patient could go to the operating room, which consists of more physicians, nurses, technicians, and other professionals.
Other surgical specialists — such as orthopaedic surgeons, neurosurgeons, and cardiac surgeons — also may get involved in trauma cases. So may physical, occupational, and speech therapists. The team is maintained with 24/7 readiness.
Find out more about the UPMC Trauma Care System.
Editor's Note: This article was originally published on , and was last reviewed on .