Dominic Barfield here and this is the RVC clinical podcast. Today we're going to talk to Zoe

Hafferoy, Senior Lecturer and Soft Tissue surgery about bite wounds in general. Traumatic injuries are quite

common that we see in the QMH, both in the referral and the first opinion of the general practice

out of hours cases that we see out of ours on the weekends.

And really, I think, a bit differently to the first opinion demographic of cats and dogs,

probably it's not an equal distribution.

There's definitely more dogs associated with these sort of injuries of traumatic wounds.

But over 40% are cats. So a third of all our trauma

cases have penetrating injuries, and half of those are from bite wounds, which I imagine is

probably similar to what is seen in general practice. The routine approach to these cases are just kind of the same as in the major body assessment

and maybe the use of different trauma scores to evaluate these patients.

So there's the animal trauma triad score which was evaluated out of the University of Penn a number of years ago

and that's being used by the vet cop which is a veterinary initiative of trauma to capture information and see how valuable that that is.

So we still have the same approach to patients with traumatic injuries and respiratory distress as far as

unbelieves not necessarily associated with any mortality but obviously you know

we treat the shock can give them oxygen fluids and analgesia and antibiotics so

so my first question to you would be say do you have any preference for type of analgesia

you use in traumatic patients?

I think it's very important that we recognise that these patients can suffer very extreme pain,

but of course it can be variable because the extent of the trauma is very variable and cannot be readily appreciated

by looking at the superficial wounds.

So of course, careful patient assessment and pain

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