Annals of emergency medicine
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The Glasgow Coma Scale (GCS) score is widely used to assess patients with head injury but has been criticized for its complexity and poor interrater reliability. A 3-point Simplified Motor Score (SMS) (defined as obeys commands=2, localizes pain=1, and withdraws to pain or worse=0) was created to address these limitations. Our goal is to validate the SMS in the out-of-hospital setting, with the hypothesis that it is equivalent to the GCS score for discriminating brain injury outcomes. ⋯ In this external validation, SMS was similar to the GCS score for predicting outcomes in traumatic brain injury in the out-of-hospital setting.
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We determine the rate at which trauma patients re-present to the emergency department (ED) after discharge from the hospital and determine whether re-presentation is related to race, insurance, and socioeconomic factors such as neighborhood income level. ⋯ A substantial number of trauma patients return to the ED within 30 days of being discharged, but only a small proportion of these patients required readmission. Re-presentation is associated with being uninsured or underinsured and with lower neighborhood income level.