Conference Overview

Despite the high degree of organization, practice guidelines and well-developed protocols followed by trauma and acute care surgery professionals, care of critically ill and injured patients remains prone to error. Analyzing major errors and learning how to prevent them from occurring again in the future is an  essential component of improving the safety of trauma and acute care surgery. Thus, the goal of developing early error recognition and rescue measures to prevent bad outcomes continues to be a top priority for trauma centers. The 2023 San Diego Day of Trauma will focus on errors and lessons learned by our colleagues in the field. Nationally renowned speakers will present crucial errors they encountered, as well as interventions including operative techniques, institutional practices and approaches not always discussed in textbooks or literature, that were essential to accomplish rescue and prevention of bad outcomes. Speakers will include specialists in the fields of pre-hospital care, trauma surgery and critical care. Lectures, real-life case presentations and interactive sessions will engage attendees to promote improved patient outcomes.

Educational Objectives

After attending this live activity, participants should be able to:

• Review crucial errors and their root causes in the care of critically ill and injured patients.

• Describe the importance of risk assessment to identify errors most likely to occur.

• Recognize errors in progress to prevent their full impact.

• Outline effective interventions to rescue patients following life and limb threatening errors.

• Identify the elements of effective root cause analysis of the error to learn how to prevent similar occurrences.

• Implement practice changes to increase patient safety and mitigate threats to effective care.

Target Audience

• Trauma Specialists

• Critical Care Specialists

• Emergency Medicine Specialists

• Pre-hospital Personnel

• First Responders