Research Highlight: Teletrauma in Rural Emergency Departments

The CTAAN Connector newsletter shares current research that can impact aging in the north. In this issue, we describe a literature survey on the use of Teletrauma and highlight how further use can facilitate aging in place and enhance equitable health care access for rural trauma residents. Stay tuned each issue for more exciting research.

Currently, little is known about who uses Teletrauma in rural areas. As a large proportion of rural residents are aging, a Teletrauma system designed to meet the needs of rural residents may help clinicians manage trauma patients locally. This may allow residents to remain in the community, avoiding long travel distances and time away from home.

We searched research literature for information on studies involving a way of delivering remote health care called Teletrauma. Teletrauma is a video-conferencing service used to connect health care clinicians at a distance for the delivery of emergency and trauma care.

We found that essential Teletrauma components typically included a real-time bidirectional two-way audiovisual video-conferencing system with a dedicated network line (so healthcare worker and patient can see and hear each other).

Teletrauma was suited to rural trauma care situations and was acceptable from the provider’s perspective with high levels of satisfaction reported by clinicians. Teletrauma use was consistently found to be associated with higher severity of illness or injury and younger patient age.

Moving forward, information from this study can be used to aid in the development of a targeted approach to Teletrauma use, allowing rural residents to access high quality care where they live.

This would reduce the need for travel outside the community, facilitating aging in place and enhancing equitable health care access for rural trauma residents.

-Timothy Wood