Trauma International – Truly New, Truly International

Abstract

Trauma is one of the most basic faculty of medicine and treatment of injured is the oldest known speciality. The burden of trauma in immense and with current technological developments road traffic accidents and industrial accidents present with varied patient profiles. There is always a need for personalised care which also depends on the expertise of the surgeon involved. The infrastructure and facilities for trauma care also vary across the world and many practices are modified according to local needs. Care of the injured involves orthopaedic surgeon, general surgeon, plastic surgeon and occasionally vascular surgeon, neurosurgeon and other allied faculties. Multispecialty collaboration is needed for successful treatment of any trauma scenario. The entire point of the first paragraph is that trauma surgery is a very multifaceted speciality and involves complex decision making and requires equally complex specialities to be symbiotic. The same should reflect in the Trauma literature and this is the basic aim of starting the new journal. Trauma International is primarily a journal of Orthopaedic trauma and surgery, but it will also provide platform for all specialities involved in trauma care. Many a times while reading a journal we feel that many articles are almost irrelevant as far as practical patient care is concerned. There are many articles that wouldd focus on statistical or analytic part more than the actual clinical relevance of the study. Trauma International will focus on publishing most clinically relevant articles that will be useful in day to day clinical practice. The format of the articles will be easy to read with clinical relevance highlighted separately. Editors will be frequently commenting on the articles and will be clarifying any difficult issues that they feel require simplification . Readers will be allowed to comment online as well as through letter to editor channel. On other hand we will be including formats like technique videos, tips and tricks, innovations, most memorable patient etc where surgeons would be encouraged to share their experience and also help other learn from their experiences. The whole exercise is to provide the reader something that they can interact with and not something dead and unresponsive. Only participation from the readers and surgeon community can help us realise this dream There exists a lot of resistance especially from the surgeons from publications. This resistance is mostly because they are not familiar with the format of articles and submission process. Trauma international will be providing few solutions to overcome this resistance and encourage surgeons to publish. Firstly, as mentioned earlier we will be keeping simple formats of article submission which will be easy for beginners to write. Secondly, we have a collaboration with the orthopaedic research group and they have taken up the responsibility to guide the authors in terms of writing manuscript. This will be helpful, especially to authors who do not have English as their first language. The process will involve review and revision of primary draft and also help in formatting article as per journal guidelines. Thirdly along with Trauma International we are also launching a dedicated Journal of Trauma and Injury Case Reports. This journal will focus on providing platform to first time authors . This will be done through a special peer review process we call as ‘assistive peer review’. Here the along with providing the review, the reviewers will also suggest and correct the manuscript at most places. This will help the authors understand their errors and also help them learn methods used to correct the errors. This Assistive Peer Review will also be provided for Trauma International. We believe these initiatives will help trauma surgeons to publish more and participate in creating a global literature. Trauma International has received great support especially from the international community and we are proud to say that members of more than 40 countries have joined the Editorial board of Trauma International. This makes the journal a truly international journal. Since trauma is one of the most widespread practiced branch, we will be including more members till we have at least one member form each country in the world. This will help us collaborate and learn from each other in much better ways. We would like to thank all our contributors of the first issue. Special thanks to Dr DD Tanna for sharing his life experiences with us and letting us know about his journey as a trauma surgeon. I think we have promised a lot in this opening editorial but then we are equally passionate about holding ourselves to every promise that we made here. We invite suggestions and also invite you all to participate actively with the journal. With this we leave you to enjoy the issue. Dr Ashok Shyam Editor – Trauma International