It’s not as if we need further information about how trauma touches so many lives in this country; it’s not as if we needed more information that not wearing seatbelts can and does cause unnecessary trauma injury and death. The new crop of inductees into the Pro Football Hall of Fame gave us just that.

We just got done posting an article about a trauma center reopening, and the importance of trauma systems, this is what it’s really all about. Florida has a very well formed trauma system. In Miami/Dade, there is only one level 1 trauma center, the world renowned Ryder Trauma Center. Ryder is the only free standing trauma center in the nation—that is; its one building dedicated solely to trauma care. This...

The faces of courage, the faces of heroes; this is something that most of us don’t fully understand. What is courage? Who is a hero? The Latter is a bit easier to define. Yet across this nation, there is a legion of heroes who rarely get any recognition. Really, survivors of anything truly life altering fall into that category. 

For both survivors of trauma injury where the mechanism of trauma is a car accident, and indeed for those that survive tragic death by trauma, for some a big part of the struggle is “do they make contact”. It’s very important to many, and some do, and some do not. It’s a challenge of expectations hoped for or dashed. There in lies the problem. There are so many possible scenarios especially in traffic...

Cleveland OH — Based on cell phone records before and during the accident that killed a pedestrian, Angela Williams, 49, a former bus driver for the RTA in Ohio was indicted on aggravated vehicular homicide, vehicular homicide, and vehicular manslaughter by the Cuyahoga County prosecutor’s office. On March 14, 2009, Patrick Merrill was legally in a crosswalk in downtown Cleveland as the RTA bus driven by...

A report recently released by the Florida Department of Health shows falls are the leading cause of death and injury in residents 64 and older. We all assume that it’s heart disease and cancer, but this study show a different story. According to the report, in 2007 some 1,700 Floridians suffered fatal injuries from a fall and more than 53,000 required hospitalization and treatment.The study showed that more...

One of the programs we encourage people to visit and use most highly is the Trauma Survivors Network by the American Trauma Society. One of the components of that program is called 2nd Trauma. It’s a component that is geared towards surgeons, nurses and social workers. The premise is learning tools to treat family members of trauma victims with more compassion and a deeper sense of care for them. It’s called...

The same blue food dye found in M&Ms and Gatorade could be used to reduce damage caused by spine injuries, offering a better chance of recovery, according to new research.

A recent study conducted by researchers at Johns Hopkins University and the Bloomberg School of Public Health showed that elderly trauma patients are less likely to be taken to a trauma center after being injured.  The study looked at records from over 26,000 patients from the Maryland Ambulance Information System in a ten year period from 1995 through 2004, weighing factors for trauma defined by the American...

Arkansas is the only state in the union that does not have a Level 1 Trauma Center, and one of 3 that has no statewide trauma system in place. The process to change that was put into place this month as Gov. Mike Beebe announced that he has set aside $200,000 from the $500,000-a-year Governor’s Emergency Fund to help pay for computer hardware and software to collect and store the information. The effort...