Doctors and nurses of the Accident and Emergency Department at the Victoria Hospital this week participated in a two-day Advanced Trauma Life Support (ATLS) training course.

The Victoria Hospital sees the majority of trauma cases on island, and in the last four years has experienced an increase in trauma cases, causing the Accident and Emergency Department (A&E) to move to a protocol-driven, systematic approach to the trauma patient.

Head of A&E, Dr. Lisa Charles, said it is vital that across the board doctors and nurses have an approach to trauma which ensures they don’t miss major injuries.

“Training in trauma life support is applicable to any trauma patient in any hospital,” she explained. “In fact, the trauma course itself is designed for hospital where immediate care by surgeons is not available on occasion. So it gives, for instance the ER physician, the capabilities to manage and stabilize the patient over a period of time before we can get the patient to definitive care. It’s applicable everywhere. Certainly at Victoria Hospital we have access to surgeons, but in the middle of the night sometimes you have ER physicians who are on their own, and it’s really important that they have the practice skills and the knowledge to know what to do in that first half hour to stabilize a trauma patient, recognize life-threatening injuries and intervene appropriately.”

Holders of the ATLS certification must do a refresher course every four years in order to retain the certification. The Ryder Treatment Centre will also assist the Victoria Hospital in developing a trauma alert system, trauma treatment guidelines and a trauma data registry.

One of the facilitators, Dr. Daniel Pust, stated that trauma is the most common cause of death in children to adults aged forty. He added that the course focuses on more than just trauma care.

“It also includes important community outreach programmes in order to teach certain safety efforts like wearing a seat belt when you operate a motor vehicle, and violence prevention programmes to reduce the numbers of gunshot wound victims and stab wound victims. So the community outreach programmes are a very important step. Also, child safety and child safety seats in motor vehicles are very important to prevent trauma. So a big aspect of this initiative is also the prevention of injury and trauma.”

Course Director for the (ATLS) programme in Miami, Dr. George Garcia provided further insight into the programme.

“The course is sponsored by the American College of Surgeons Committee on trauma. It is currently taught is over 60 countries and we are extremely proud and grateful to add Saint Lucia to that list. The most recent statistic is there are over a million providers worldwide training in ATLS.”

There were 20 participants in this first round of training conducted under the umbrella of the St Lucia Heart Lung and Blood Foundation. Participants included general surgeons and ER physicians, nurses from ER and the operating theatre, anesthesiologist and junior ER physicians. The course was facilitated by the Ryder Trauma Center at the University of Miami.