Staffing the Trauma room

Trauma Columnist · Jul 7, 2004

I work level one trauma center also and that is what we do also...

Fly4Life12 · Jul 7, 2004

Usually we have a nurse A, a nurse B, a medic/tech/CP1, and a recorder. then the residents, drs, etc. we dont always get a nurse B for Red traumas, and usually never for Yellow traumas, but we are supposed to. we are usually too busy to pull another nurse away from her patients. the pediatric dept. (we have an adult side and peds side) usually sends us one of their nurses to either be B or to record. sometimes the housing superviser comes down to record. Sometimes the LifeFlight nurses come to help us as well.

nursenary57 · Jul 29, 2004

We have 3 trauma bays and we staff with 1 RN and 1 EMT-P (at least that is what it says on the assignment sheet!) When there are no trauma patients they float to the other assignments and help out with other patients. Of course if there are multiple trauma patients we pull from other assignments and do what you gotta to keep things going. Most traumas we have had at one time since I've been in the ER is seven. 2 were level 1s, 1 level 2 and 4 level 4s so it wasn't too bad. All from some interstate pileup.

For the level 1s we have the RN/EMT-P or 2 RNs, a tech, a recorder, RT, ER resident and attending, 2 from xray, and the trauma service (1 attending, 3 residents and 1 NP). Quite a crowd. And another RN from ER lurking in the background to run the Level 1 infuser if needed. The trauma team doesn't use it much upstairs so most are not familiar with the operation of it. Unfortunately alot of the ER people don't know much about it either! I've probably used it 30 times max in 2 years.

We definitely have room for improvement but I just finished a travel assignment where we had a level 1 trauma and it was only me and a surgery resident! Not their typical staffing but they were having a rough day to say the least.

downhillracer · Aug 1, 2004

----------------wrong area