Advanced Trauma Life Support Time Standards

Trauma readiness is critical to military medicine. Without medical centers that include persistent volumes of trauma, simulation has become the means to maintain and practice those skills. To create those simulations, standards for both design and metrics to evaluate practitioners are required.

Forty-four traumas were monitored and times to completion of the various steps of Advanced Trauma Life Support were recorded and tabulated. The times recorded for level 1 and level 2 traumas were compared without statistical differences identified.

Normative times for various portions of the Advanced Trauma Life Support protocol were provided. These include time to airway assessment, breathing assessment, circulation assessment, establishment of intravenous, completion of primary survey, chest X-ray, first set of vitals, and focused assessment with sonography for trauma scan.

Using these mean times, simulations can be created to best replicate traumas and evaluate the capabilities of practitioners.