Hospitals’ compliance with guidelines for treating brain injuries doesn’t guarantee better outcomes

Two decades ago, the Brain Trauma Foundation published its first set of guidelines for treating traumatic brain injury. Now, a study by the Los Angeles County Trauma Consortium — which includes several physicians from UCLA — has found that compliance with those guidelines doesn’t necessarily translate into better results for patients. In research published online by the peer-reviewed journal JAMA Surgery, the consortium analyzed 2009 and 2010 data from all 14 L.A. County trauma centers and found no evidence that compliance with the guidelines led to lower mortality rates. “There is no direct connection between the rate at which a hospital does what it is supposed to do for traumatic brain injury patients and how likely their patients are to die from their injuries after we adjust for other important patient characteristics,” said Dr. Aaron Dawes, the study’s lead author and a resident in general surgery at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA. The consortium is made up of health services researchers from UCLA and the University of Southern California, and representatives of the trauma centers and the county’s Emergency Medical Services Agency. Researchers calculated how often trauma centers follow the guidelines, which include management strategies and specific criteria for use of two invasive procedures — intracranial pressure monitoring and craniotomy. Intracranial pressure monitoring involves drilling a small hole in the skull in order to insert a s...
Source: UCLA Newsroom: Health Sciences - Category: Universities & Medical Training Source Type: news