NHS: REAL LIFE TRAUMA

27-10-2007

The Stirrer has hosted a vigorous debate about whether Birmingham's Selly Oak Hospital is the most suitable place to treat soldiers injured in conflicts abroad. But Simon Gray wants to know when the process is going to start working the other way.

"Helping Wounded Soldiers Defy The Odds" ran the headline on a story I read this week (see BBC link here )

To save you reading all of it, I've picked out the choice bit.

"More British servicemen were seriously injured in Afghanistan in the
first nine months of 2007 than in the whole of the rest of the present
conflict.

"Grim as that fact is, many of those so-called 'catastrophic'
wounds would have been fatal in previous wars.

"Indeed, military medicine has come so far that Professor Tim Hodgetts believes the chances of a soldier surviving can be greater than a civilian with similar injuries".

The article then goes on to list some of the specifics of how soldiers
are at an advantage to civilians when it comes to severe trauma
injuries:

Prof Hodgetts says the military has a 'sophisticated trauma
system' that puts field hospitals like that in Camp Bastion in
Afghanistan "ahead of the National Health Service" when it comes to
dealing with casualties.

He himself helped develop a dressing containing crushed prawn
shells which can stop bleeding from the aorta - the body's main artery
- in just two and a half minutes.

Army doctors have also mastered the technique of 'intra-osseous
access', injecting drugs or vital fluids into bones when access to a
vein is impossible due to massive injury.

Now, whilst by no means begrudging the advanced healthcare which
soldiers on active service have access to, the question has to be
asked....what about the rest of us?

Where is the special dressing which can stop arterial bleeding in 2
and a half minutes in the National Health Service at large?

Why do our civilian paramedics apparently not have access to such
simple life-saving techniques and equipment?

Are civilians second class when it comes to severe trauma?