Welcome to the Emergency Medicine Cases podcast.

I'm your host, Dr. Anton Hellman, bringing you Canada's brightest minds in emergency medicine from EMC Studios in Toronto.

All right, here we go.

Episode number 118 trauma, the first and last 15 minutes.

So contrary to the expectations of the lay public, the truth is emergency medicine is very

rarely a matter of seconds to minutes.

With the exception of a few presentations, the reality is, for the most part, we really are

practicing urgency medicine.

As the old adage goes, only two things happen instantly in medicine, vascular things and electrical things.

Today we're here to say it's high time a new item was added to this list, and that is trauma.

For innumerable reasons, trauma happens instantly, but can be addressed rather slowly.

Paramedic on-scene times can be lengthy, often involving huge distances or difficult

extractions from twisted motor vehicle collisions.

Laboratory and imaging findings can be delayed by medical, systems, and human factors.

Even the most basic interventions like applying a Thomas splint or inserting a Foley catheter can cause unexpected delays.

What the research is increasingly showing is that there's a golden period of intervention that can dramatically reshape your patient's outcome.

We're not talking about the old golden hour. We're talking, of course, about the first 15 minutes,

the golden window whose importance cannot be overstated. Today, we'll be spending much more than

15 minutes discussing this critical period in trauma care.

The too good to miss quarter of an hour that can be the difference between coma and

neurological recovery and TBI, uncompensated shock and profusion pressure and hemorrhagic shock,

or even life or death for your next trauma patient.

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