[Trauma room workload in German trauma centers : Reality of trauma care underrepresented in reform]

The Federal Joint Committee (G-BA) published a regulation on a staged system for emergency structures in hospitals (according to Social Security Code V) in April 2018 and therefore established the foundations for emergency care in the inpatient sector. The structural requirements for the care of potentially severely injured patients is primarily defined by the specialist society and means a high provision of personnel with a simultaneous annual increase in the burden due to increasing numbers of patients. Critics fear that the reforms do not take sufficient account of trauma care both professionally and financially. The aim of the study was to record the actual workload of the emergency trauma rooms in certified German trauma centers.

A nationwide online survey was performed in Germany among 619 trauma centers certified by the German Society for Trauma Surgery (DGU®) to quantify the frequency of trauma room callouts. The results were retrospectively compared with the data from the annual reports of the TraumaRegister (TR) DGU® from 2021 and 2022.

The 167 participating hospitals reported 22,479 trauma room callouts in 2021 and 24,366 in 2022 (response rate of the online survey 24.1%). Of these callouts 70% concerned level 1 supraregional trauma centers. The comparative analysis showed that the actual number of callouts is 3-5 times higher than the data documented in the TR-DGU® . Of the trauma rooms 80% were not included in the register due to low injury severity. The study confirms the discrepancy between the documented and actual workload of the trauma rooms in German trauma centers and emphasizes the necessity to adjust the financial and personnel consideration of the trauma centers to the actual utilization in order to ensure a continuing high quality of care.