Abstract
Acute Care Surgery is a discipline that includes trauma care, surgical critical care, and emergency surgery. It is organized in different models and provides mainly operative and nonoperative care. The aim of this study was to provide a demographic analysis of the care of surgical patients at the Emergency Department (ED) in a large teaching hospital in Shanghai, where general surgeons and orthopedic surgeons take care for most of all acute surgery. A bilingual questionnaire was developed to collect data for patients referred to the general or orthopedic surgeon in the ED (June–September 2008). Data about the gender, age, diagnosis, diagnostic tools, treatments, and outcomes were collected. A total of 255 questionnaires were collected; the most common diagnoses of patients were infections of abdominal organs and fractures. Complementary diagnostics like X-ray (59%), blood tests (36%), and ultrasound (17%) were frequently used. More than half of the patients were discharged afterwards most of them with followup. This study gives a first overview of acute care surgery of the emergency patients of the ED in a large Chinese metropolitan hospital.
Highlights
The first civilian trauma centres were built in the UnitedStates in the late 1960s
In this first period this specialty mainly supplied operative care, but nowadays the elective procedures are distinguished from trauma surgery and so the acute care surgery mainly provides nonoperative care [1]
The acute care surgery evolved into trauma care, surgical critical care, and emergency surgery [4, 5], as described by the American Association for the Surgery of Trauma [6, 7]
Summary
It was the revival of a surgical discipline that cares for the injured patients [1, 2]. In the 1980s trauma surgery became a specialty in the USA and in many places in Europe [3]. In this first period this specialty mainly supplied operative care, but nowadays the elective procedures are distinguished from trauma surgery and so the acute care surgery mainly provides nonoperative care [1]. Acute care surgery has become divided into many different specialties. In one model emergency surgery is provided by an acute care surgery specialists including trauma surgeons and in another emergency surgery is subdivided among the different surgical specialties. The first model is mainly common in the United States; the second model predominates in Europe [9]
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