JH-IIRU Examines the Effectiveness of Injury Severity Score in Low-Resource Setting

Injury severity scores are important and necessary tools for both evaluating care of the injured patient and establishing institutional quality and research practices. In high-income countries (HICs), several injury severity scores have been used to evaluate and study trauma patients; however, despite the fact that more than 90% of the estimated 5.8 million deaths each year caused by injury worldwide occur in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs), few scores have been validated for use in these countries.  The Kampala Trauma Score (KTS) is an injury severity score that was developed specifically for use in low-resource settings.

In the recently published paper, “Is the Kampala Trauma Score an Effective Predictor of Mortality in Low-Resource Settings? A Comparison of Multiple Trauma Severity Scores,” a group of researchers, including Johns Hopkins International Injury Research Unit’s (JH-IIRU) associate director, Kent Stevens and director, Adnan Hyder, compared five trauma severity scores against the ability of KTS to predict mortality of trauma patients in the Central Hospital of Yaounde, Cameroon.

The results suggest that there is potential for the adoption of KTS for injury surveillance and triage in resource-limited settings and that KTS is as effective as other scoring systems in predicting patient mortality. Because the system is simple to administer and record, this makes KTS a potentially valuable tool for low-resource settings, where many hospitals are understaffed and basic record-keeping and data collection is unreliable or incomplete.

To read more about the study, click here.