Do older patients wait longer for CT trauma evaluation?

Tuesday, November 27 | 3:30 p.m.-3:40 p.m. | SSJ06-04 | Room S402AB

Older trauma patients tend to wait longer for CT exams than younger patients do, despite presenting with similar types of injuries, researchers have found.

A group from the Republic of Ireland, led by presenter Dr. Brendan Kelly from St. Vincent's University Hospital in Dublin, set out to determine the possible causes of delays in the assessment and treatment of traumatic injuries.

To that end, the researchers reviewed the data of approximately 1,000 trauma cases from the Trauma Audit and Research Network. The patients' average age was 63 years, and the mean injury severity score was 13, where a score of 15 indicated major trauma. The most common mechanism of injury was a fall, followed by a motor vehicle accident. All the trauma patients had roughly the same likelihood of requiring a CT exam regardless of age.

Among all the trauma patients, those who were older than 65 had a significantly longer hospital waiting time before undergoing a CT exam, compared with patients younger than 65. The finding proved to be true even after controlling for gender, injury severity score, and date and time of presentation at the hospital.

Overall, the average waiting time for a CT exam was more than 200% longer for the older cohort. This occurred despite the belief that older trauma patients generally fare worse in terms of morbidity and mortality and, thus, may need more immediate care, Kelly and colleagues noted.

Emergency and radiology clinicians may need to consider implementing new strategies to minimize this delay in diagnostic imaging for older patients with traumatic injuries, they concluded.