Evaluating trauma care: the TRISS method. Trauma Score and the Injury Severity Score.

TLDR

Trauma care evaluation must be integral to systems for seriously injured patients and comparable to national standards, with the TRISS method providing a standard approach. The article serves as a resource for professionals developing or upgrading trauma care evaluation. TRISS quantifies survival probability using anatomic, physiologic, and age data, and the article presents calculation methods and explains the Z and M statistics for non‑statisticians. TRISS enables local quality‑assurance case identification and facilitates outcome comparison across different trauma patient populations.

Abstract

Evaluation of trauma care must be an integral part of any system designed for care of seriously injured patients. However, outcome review should offer comparability to national standards or norms. The TRISS method offers a standard approach for evaluating outcome of trauma care. Anatomic, physiologic, and age characteristics are used to quantify probability of survival as related to severity of injury. TRISS offers a means of case identification for quality assurance review on a local basis, as well as a means of comparison of outcome for different populations of trauma patients. Methods for calculating statistics associated with TRISS are presented. The Z and M statistics are explained with the nonstatistician in mind. We feel this article is a source for those interested in developing or upgrading trauma care evaluation.