Yesterday I requested your help in figuring out how big a trauma resuscitation room should be. As promised, I brought in my trusty tape measure today to check out my trauma bays at Regions Hospital. I came up with several helpful measurements to help gauge the relative utility of the rooms.
Here are the indices that I came up with:
- TBTA: Trauma Bay Total Area. This is the total square footage (meterage?) measured wall to wall.
- TBWA: Trauma Bay Working Area. This is the area that excludes equipment carts next to a wall, and areas under countertops that extend away from the wall.
- TBAA: Trauma Bay Available Area. This is the TBWA less any other unusable areas in the room. We have an equipment post near one corner that eats up 16.5 sq ft of space. Also remember to subtract the area taken up by the patient bed, as this area is not available to the trauma team, either.
- TBSI: Trauma Bay Space Index. This value is derived by dividing the TBAA by the number of team members in the room. It gives an indication of how much space is available for each one to work in.
Values in my trauma center:
- TBTA: 291 sq ft
- TBWA: 220.5 sq ft
- TBAA: 186.5 sq ft
- TBSI: 15.5
What does it all mean? Hard to say without more info from you for comparison. For my team, it means we each have a 4×4 foot square to move around in, on average.
Keep on sending info on your trauma resuscitation rooms! Leave comments below, or tweet/email me the values for the metrics listed above. Once I get a critical mass of them, I’ll write a detailed post on the results!
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