Primary care assessment of orbital trauma at a level 1 trauma centre

With increasing constraints on our publicly funded health care system, appropriate triage of trauma patients is becoming pivotal, making the primary care assessment (PCA) invaluable. Our study aims to compare the initial assessment of patients with orbital fractures with that conducted by the ophthalmology service.

Retrospective chart review.

243 patients with 277 fractured orbits presenting to a level 1 trauma centre seen between August 2015 and January 2018.

Key elements of the PCA, including subjective vision loss, visual acuity, intraocular pressure, pupil examination, and extraocular movements, were documented and compared with the assessment by the ophthalmology service as the control. The primary outcome was inter-rater reliability as estimated by Cohen's kappa (κ) coefficient. Secondary outcomes included the sensitivity and specificity, as well as the rate of completion of examination components.

PCA examination findings agreed with the ophthalmology service on most components of the examination with the highest agreement with relative afferent pupillary defects and detection of hyphemas (κ = 1). Primary care physicians less often performed most aspects of the assessment. Among performed components of the examination, the average sensitivity was 60.6%, and the average specificity was 84.2%.

Our results show good inter-rater reliability of the PCA compared with the ophthalmology examination but low rate of completion of examination components, suggesting a potential overdependence on the ophthalmology assessment. Given the limited resources of the public health care system, our study may highlight the PCA as a potential focus to improve effective and safe patient management.