Retrospective Cohort Study
Copyright ©The Author(s) 2016. Published by Baishideng Publishing Group Inc. All rights reserved.
World J Orthop. Aug 18, 2016; 7(8): 481-486
Published online Aug 18, 2016. doi: 10.5312/wjo.v7.i8.481
Criteria for level 1 and level 2 trauma codes: Are pelvic ring injuries undertriaged?
Brittany E Haws, Scott Wuertzer, Laura Raffield, Leon Lenchik, Anna N Miller
Brittany E Haws, Wake Forest School of Medicine, Medical Center Boulevard, Winston-Salem, NC 27157, United States
Scott Wuertzer, Leon Lenchik, Department of Radiology, Medical Center Boulevard, Winston-Salem, NC 27157, United States
Laura Raffield, Department of Molecular Genetics and Genomics, Medical Center Boulevard, Winston-Salem, NC 27157, United States
Anna N Miller, Department of Orthopaedic Surgery, Medical Center Boulevard, Winston-Salem, NC 27157, United States
Author contributions: Wuertzer S, Lenchik L and Miller AN designed and performed the research; Haws BE, Raffield L and Miller AN analyzed the data; Haws BE wrote the paper with editing by the remaining authors.
Institutional review board statement: This study has been approved by the Wake Forest Medical Center Institutional Review Board.
Informed consent statement: Consent was not obtained because the presented data was anonymized and risk of identification is low.
Conflict-of-interest statement: The authors of this study do not endorse any conflicts of interest.
Data sharing statement: Technical appendix, statistical code, and dataset available from the corresponding author at behaws1@gmail.com.
Open-Access: This article is an open-access article which was selected by an in-house editor and fully peer-reviewed by external reviewers. It is distributed in accordance with the Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial (CC BY-NC 4.0) license, which permits others to distribute, remix, adapt, build upon this work non-commercially, and license their derivative works on different terms, provided the original work is properly cited and the use is non-commercial. See: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/
Correspondence to: Brittany E Haws, BS, Medical Student, Wake Forest School of Medicine, Medical Center Boulevard, Winston-Salem, NC 27157, United States. behaws1@gmail.com
Telephone: +1-336-7163950 Fax: +1-336-7167310
Received: February 17, 2016
Peer-review started: February 19, 2016
First decision: March 25, 2016
Revised: April 8, 2016
Accepted: June 1, 2016
Article in press: June 3, 2016
Published online: August 18, 2016
Core Tip

Core tip: The assignment of trauma level is important as it dictates the urgency of response and the size of the responding team. Because of the high morbidity and mortality from pelvic fractures, especially unstable pelvic fractures, it is critical that these injuries be appropriately triaged once discovered or suspected. Our study did not show an association between the severity of the pelvic ring injury and the trauma code level. This lack of an association suggests patients with significant pelvic injuries may be under-triaged. These injuries may benefit from a more severe trauma code status to prevent any undue morbidity or mortality.