In my last post, I detailed some standard info on trauma bay size. Today, I’ll describe what I found when I brought in my trusty tape measure a few years ago to check out the old 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 trauma team member to work in.
Values in the old trauma bays at 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? You’ll have to work out the details using measurements from your own resuscitation room. For my old rooms, it meant we each had a 4×4 foot square to move around in, on average. This was fairly tight, I would say. Fortunately, we’ve moved to new rooms with much, much more space.
Tune in to my next post this week on my thoughts on outfitting your resuscitation room.
