Mortality for hypotensive trauma patients undergoing emergency laparotomy have not changed in 20 years. This blog explores the literature and the future! Wait! We’re emergency physicians, why do we care about laparotomies?! Sure, at face value this would appear to have a rather surgical slant to it, but I hope by the end you share my feeling that, as emergency and critical care physicians, this is absolutely in our sphere of concern. If we mess about performing interventions, take our foot of the gas with the urgency of the clinical trajectory, or simply just don’t have quick way of getting to theatre, are we harming patients? I also LOVE the fact that the introduction to their paper is only 64 words long. The paper was based on the data from 243 patients from 1986-1999. They looked at SBP on admission to the ED, the length of time spent in ED, and the clinical outcome and plugged the numbers into a logistic regression model.

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