Degree project portal

In 2017 Swedish national guidelines for in-hospital trauma team activation were published by Löf as part of ‘Safe Trauma Care’ project ('Säker Traumavård'). Recent studies have confirmed the accuracy of the Swedish trauma triage criteria as predictors of severe injury, and multiple attempts at introducing and evaluating criteria-based triage systems in different part of Scandinavia have also shown this to be an appropriate tool to increase early identification of traumatic injuries. However, several patient factors vary significantly between the examined cohorts and the average trauma patients at emergency hospitals in Stockholm, where a high proportion of elderly patients constitute the severely injured trauma population. Oscar Lapidus' proposed PhD project examines the efficacy of using the national guidelines for trauma team activation to accurately identify severe injuries in geriatric trauma patients, with the goal of proposing a set of alternative trauma team activation criteria specifically adapted to identify severely injured geriatric trauma patients in order to decrease systematic under-triage and morbidity.

As part of the project described above, we have the ability to supervise 1-2 degree projects in medicine each semester, for which we will identify a well-defined research question within the project that can be examined retrospectively using data from the Swedish Trauma Registry (SweTrau). Interested students are encouraged to contact Oscar directly via e-mail (listed below). A genuine interest in prehospital medicine and trauma is essential for this project; previous research experience is desirable but not required.