ATLS

Advanced Trauma Life Support

Mesa Medical Group's resident orthopedic surgeon, Dr. James K. Styner, was the impetus behind ATLS, which has changed the face of trauma care throughout the world.

Overview

Advanced Trauma Life Support (ATLS) is a training program for doctors and Advanced Practice/Critical Care Paramedics in the management of acute trauma cases, developed by the American College of Surgeons. The program has been adopted worldwide in over 40 countries, sometimes under the name of Early Management of Severe Trauma (EMST), especially outside North America. Its goal is to teach a simplified and standardized approach to trauma patients. Originally designed for emergency situations where only one doctor and one nurse are present, ATLS is now widely accepted as the standard of care for initial assessment and treatment in trauma centers. The premise of the ATLS program is to treat the greatest threat to life first. It also advocates that the lack of a definitive diagnosis and a detailed history should not slow the application of indicated treatment for life-threatening injury, with the most time-critical interventions performed early.

History

ATLS has its origins in the United States in 1976, when orthopedic surgeon Dr. James K. Styner, piloting a light aircraft, crashed his plane into a field in Nebraska. His wife was killed instantly and three of his four children sustained critical injuries. He carried out the initial triage of his children at the crash site. Dr. Styner had to flag down a car to transport him to the nearest hospital; upon arrival, he found it closed. Even once the hospital was opened and a doctor called in, he found that the emergency care provided at the small regional hospital where they were treated was inadequate and inappropriate.

Upon returning to work, he set about developing a system for saving lives in medical trauma situations. Styner and his colleague Paul 'Skip' Collicott, with assistance from Advanced Cardiac Life Support personnel and the Lincoln Medical Education Foundation, produced the initial ATLS course which was held in 1978. In 1980, the American College of Surgeons Committee on Trauma adopted ATLS and began US and international dissemination of the course. Styner himself recently recertified as an ATLS instructor, teaching his Instructor Candidate course in the UK and then in the Netherlands.

Since its inception, ATLS has become the standard for trauma care in American emergency departments and advanced paramedical services. Since emergency physicians, paramedics and other advanced practitioners use ATLS as their model for trauma care it makes sense that programs for other providers caring for trauma would be designed to interface well with ATLS. The Society of Trauma Nurses has developed the Advanced Trauma Care for Nurses (ATCN) course for Registered Nurses. ATCN meets concurrently with ATLS and shares some of the lecture portions. This approach allows for medical and nursing care to be well coordinated with one another as both the medical and nursing care providers have been trained in essentially the same model of care. Similarly, the National Association of Emergency Medical Technicians has developed the Prehospital Trauma Life Support (PHTLS) course for basic Emergency Medical Technicians (EMT)s. This course is based around ATLS and allows the PHTLS-trained EMTs to work alongside paramedics and to transition smoothly into the care provided by the ATLS and ATCN-trained providers in the hospital.