TexasCHLforum.com

J.R.@A&M wrote:https://hub.jhu.edu/2018/04/16/prehospi ... 3-69578297

The "gun violence" rhetoric aside, I thought this was interesting. If I understand it correctly, it analyzes fatal shootings and stabbings over time. The finding is that over time, more of the deaths are happening before arriving at a hospital, especially for stabbings.

What explains the quicker (pre-hospitalization) lethality of stabbings in the near term? I assume that the response time of EMS is unchanged, although I don't think the article addressed that.

"After adjusting for factors such as injury severity, hypotension, and other clinically relevant factors, the research team found that patients in the late period had higher odds of prehospital death—four times higher for gunshot wounds and nearly nine times higher for stab wounds—and lower odds of in-hospital deaths. The overall mortality of gunshot and stab wounds remained stagnant, but the location of death (prehospital versus in-hospital) appears to have changed."

At the ER where I worked, it was not uncommon to transport someone who had been shot or stabbed to death to our ER, even when they were well past the point of recussitation.....more or less just to get the body off the street. They are pronounced DOA by an ER doc upon arrival at the ER. Their bodies were later recovered from the ER by the coroner’s office. But I also know that some bodies were never brought to our ER, and instead were picked up directly by the coroner’s office at the scene. Perhaps the increasing statistics are simply a reflection in a changing protocol, where fewer and fewer bodies are being transported to hospitals before being officially pronounced dead, and being picked up at the scene by coroners instead?