Tag Archives: geriatric

The Medical Orthopaedic Trauma Service

November 9, 2017 TheTraumaPro Leave a comment

Our population is aging, and falls continue to be a leading cause of injury and morbidity in the elderly. Unfortunately, many elders have significant medical conditions that make them more likely to suffer unfortunate complications from their injuries and the procedures that repair them.

More and more hospitals around the world are applying a more multidisciplinary approach than the traditional model. One example is the Medical Orthopaedic Trauma Service (MOTS) at New York-Presbyterian Hospital/Weill Cornell Medical Center. Any elderly patient who has suffered a fracture is seen in the ED by both an emergency physician and a hospitalist from the MOTS team. Once in the hospital, the hospitalist and orthopaedic surgeon try to determine the reason for the fall, assess for risk factors such as osteoporosis, provide comprehensive medical management, provide pain control, and of course, fix the fracture.

This medical center published a paper looking at their success with this model. They retrospectively reviewed 306 patients with femur fractures involving the greater trochanter. They looked at complications, length of stay, readmission rate and post-discharge mortality. No change in length of stay was noted, but there were significantly fewer complications, specifically catheter associated urinary tract infections and arrhythmias. The readmission rate was somewhat shorter in the MOTS group, but did not quite achieve significance with regression analysis.

Bottom line: This type of multidisciplinary approach to these fragile patients makes sense. Hospitalists, especially those with geriatric experience, can have a significant impact on the safety and outcomes of these patients. But even beyond this, all trauma professionals need to look for and correct the reasons for the fall, not just fix the bones and send our elders home. This responsibility starts in the field with prehospital providers, and continues with hospital through the entire inpatient stay.

Related post:

Consequences of falls in the elderly

Reference: The medical orthopaedic service (MOTS): an innovative multidisciplinary team model that decreases in-hospital complications in patients with hip fractures. J Orthopaedic Trauma 26(6):379-383, 2012.

General

Geriatric Outcome Prediction From The P.A.L.LI.A.T.E Consortium

April 24, 2017 TheTraumaPro Leave a comment

The continuing rise in geriatric trauma cases seen at trauma centers has necessitated the creation of new infrastructure for evaluating, treating, and assessing outcomes in injured elders. The ability to predict the likely outcome after trauma is extremely important in shaping the management of these patients after discussion with them and their families. Unfortunately, the tools we have for those prognostications are rather complicated, yet rudimentary.

The gold standard to date is TRISS, which combines physiologic data (revised Trauma Score) at the time of first encounter with anatomic injury information (Injury Severity Score). This allows the calculation of a validated probability of survival (Ps).

However, TRISS is unwieldy and frequently cannot be calculated due to missing data. A consortium was created to address these shortcomings. Of course, they chose a name with an unwieldy acronym: Prognostic Assessment of Life and LImitations After Trauma in the Elderly (PALLIATE).

This group developed the Geriatric Trauma Outcome Score (GTOS) in 2015. They recently published a study comparing GTOS with the gold standard TRISS. This could be important since GTOS is easier to calculate, with less opportunity for missing data since it relies only on age, ISS, and presence of blood transfusion.

They calculated outcomes of nearly 11,000 patients at three centers, and found that GTOS worked as well as TRISS. The major advantage was that GTOS requires only three variables:

GTOS = Age + (ISS x 2.5) + (22 if blood transfused in first 24 hours)

Then, just to make your head spin a little more, the GTO score value gets plugged into this logistic model equation:

Bottom line: GTOS is helpful in some ways, but not in others. It does allow calculation of the probability of survival in elderly patients as well as traditional methods, but with more readily available data points.

However, it is just a probability. It may predict that someone like your patient has a 3% probability of survival, but it cannot tell specifically that your patient is in the 3% vs the 97%. The consortium was trying to make it easier and more objective for clinicians to discuss care plans with family. But this is not really the case.

And a bigger problem is that it gives us no guidance as to quality of life or level of independence for those patients who will probably survive. These factors are, by far, the most important ones when having those hard discussion with patient and/or family. We still need a tool that will guide us on functional outcomes, not just life or death.

Related posts:

Reference: A comparison of prognosis calculators for geriatric trauma: A P.A.L.LI.A.T.E. consortium study. J Trauma, publish ahead of print DOI: 10.109, 2017.

Prevention

Geriatric Week 6: Effect Of An In-Hospital Falls Prevention Program

January 30, 2017 TheTraumaPro Leave a comment

The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) has developed a neatly packaged falls prevention program that clinicians can apply to their elderly patients. Of course, there’s a cute acronym (STEADI = Stopping Elderly Accidents, Deaths, and Injuries), and a lot of slickly packaged reference material. The trauma group at Parkland wondered if the application of this outpatient program on an inpatient population would be helpful.

They looked at elderly patients (age>65) who were admitted for falls. The patients went through STEADI evaluation and interventions, and were compared with a group of historical controls from the prior year.

Here are the factoids:

218 patients went through the STEADI process, and were compared with 194 controls
The usual demographics appeared to be the same in both groups
The fall rate in-hospital was 4.1% for both groups (!)
The fall recidivism rate (fell after discharge) was also the same (2.8% STEADI vs 2.1% controls)

STEADI consists of a number of assessments, including looking for medical conditions and medications that may

impair mobility, visual problems, gait and balance testing, footwear evaluation, cognitive screening, and home evaluation. This program was modified by the authors for inpatient use, although the exact modifications were not listed in the abstract.

Bottom line: The application of the CDC STEADI program did not appear to affect falls in-hospital or those after discharge. The authors question whether maintaining the resources ($) to implement this program is justified. The paper does raise that question, but it is not clear what modifications were made to the full program to tailor it to an inpatient population. The fact that nearly 1 in 20 elderly patients are falling in the hospital is concerning, with or without STEADI. What the abstract does confirm is that elderly falls are a huge problem. The CDC notes that 1 in every 3 patients age 65 and older will fall each year! Further evaluation of STEADI and other similar programs is essential to decrease the morbidity and mortality of falls in this age group.

Reference: UnSTEADI: Implementation of the CDC fall prevention program does not prevent in-hospital falls or reduce fall recidivism rates. Presented at EAST 2015, Paper 16.

Complications

Geriatric Week 5: Falls In The Elderly: The Consequences

January 27, 2017 TheTraumaPro Leave a comment

Falls among the elderly are a huge problem. Our trauma service typically has 6-12 elders who have sustained significant injuries on it at any given time. About a third of people living at home over the age of 65 fall in a given year. At 80 years and up, half fall every year.

Because of this, falls are the leading cause of ED visits due to an injury for those over 65. What exactly are the societal consequences of all these falls? A yet to be published study from the Netherlands looked at injuries, costs and quality of life after falls in the elderly.

The top 5 most common injuries included simple wounds, wrist and hip fractures, and brain injuries. Although hip fracture typically was #5 in the 65-74 age groups, it was uniformly #1 in the 85+ group. Patterns were similar in both men and women. Interestingly, hip fractures were by far the most expensive, making up 43% of the cost of all injuries (total €200M). The next closest injuries by total cost, superficial injuries and femur fracture, made up only 7% of the total each!

As you can imagine, quality of life suffered after falls as well. A utility score based on the EQ-5D, a validated quality of life score, was lower in fall victims. Even after 9 months, this score did not return to baseline. About 70% of elders who were admitted after their falls described mobility problems and 64% had problems with their usual activities. Over a quarter expressed problems with anxiety or depression.

Bottom line: An array of falls prevention programs are available. They need to be more aggressively implemented to reduce costs and improve the quality of life of our elders.

Reference: Social consequences of falls in the older population: injuries, healthcare costs, and long-term reduced quality of life. J Trauma 71(3):748-753, 2011.

General

Geriatric Week 4: The Medical Orthopaedic Trauma Service

January 26, 2017 TheTraumaPro Leave a comment

A few hospitals around the world are applying a more multidisciplinary approach than the traditional model. One example is the Medical Orthopaedic Trauma Service (MOTS) at New York-Presbyterian Hospital/Weill Cornell Medical Center. Any elderly patient who has suffered a fracture is seen in the ED by both an emergency physician and a hospitalist from the MOTS team. Once in the hospital, the hospitalist and orthopaedic surgeon try to determine the reason for the fall, assess for risk factors such as osteoporosis, provide comprehensive medical management, provide pain control, and of course, fix the fracture.

This medical center recently published a paper looking at their success with this model. They retrospectively reviewed 306 patients with femur fractures involving the greater trochanter. They looked at complications, length of stay, readmission rate and post-discharge mortality. No change in length of stay was noted, but there were significantly fewer complications, specifically catheter associated urinary tract infections and arrhythmias. The readmission rate was somewhat shorter in the MOTS group, but did not quite achieve significance with regression analysis.

The Trauma Pro