A Revision of the Trauma Score

Abstract

The Trauma Score (TS) has been revised. The revision includes Glasgow Coma Scale (GCS), systolic blood pressure (SBP), and respiratory rate (RR) and excludes capillary refill and respiratory expansion, which were difficult to assess in the field. Two versions of the revised score have been developed, one for triage (T-RTS) and another for use in outcome evaluations and to control for injury severity (RTS). T-RTS, the sum of coded values of GCS, SBP, and RR, demonstrated increased sensitivity and some loss in specificity when compared with a triage criterion based on TS and GCS values. T-RTS correctly identified more than 97% of nonsurvivors as requiring trauma center care. The T-RTS triage criterion does not require summing of the coded values and is more easily implemented than the TS criterion. RTS is a weighted sum of coded variable values. The RTS demonstrated substantially improved reliability in outcome predictions compared to the TS. The RTS also yielded more accurate outcome predictions for patients with serious head injuries than the TS.