Mississippi Trauma Care System

The mission of the Mississippi Trauma Care System is to develop and maintain a statewide trauma system to ensure that Mississippians receive the highest quality of care possible, to provide a continuum of care from initial injury detection through definitive care including rehabilitation, and to decrease injury and death due to traumatic injury.

Trauma - A Public Health Concern

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, unintentional traumatic injury is the leading cause of death in the United States for persons between the ages of 1 and 44 (WISQARS, 2018). Mississippi is no exception to this statistic. Moreover, in 2018 there were 33,654 motor vehicle crash fatalities in the United States. 597 of these fatalities occurred as a result of injuries sustained on Mississippi roads (FARS, 2020). Motor vehicle crashes are the leading cause of death among the teenage population in the United States (CDC, Teen Driver, 2019). Mississippi ranks 5th in the nation in terms of the number of teens killed in motor vehicle crashes ("Mississippi Fatalities and Injuries for Youth and Adult Highway Crashes," 2017). These statistics are widely circulated and well known, but they reflect the extent to which trauma is a public health concern not only in the United States generally, but in Mississippi specifically.

Data from the Mississippi State Department of Health registries shed further light on the extent to which trauma represents a public health concern and reflects how the Trauma System works to improve outcomes for trauma patients. Figure 1 provides the total numbers of Mississippi Trauma Registry entries since 2006. Each entry represents an instance of trauma care for a specific patient during this timeframe. As Figure 1 shows, Mississippi's designated trauma centers logged more than 286,746 entries in the Mississippi Trauma Registry during the period. (MS Trauma Registry, 2020).

However, even as total annual numbers of trauma encounters increased since 2006, deaths from unintentional traumatic injuries declined in the population aged 1–44 in the same period. Figure 2 shows reductions in mortality by year in the adult and pediatric populations, respectively. In other words, those who sustained unintentional traumatic injuries were more likely to survive, a fact attributable to the continued development of the Mississippi Trauma System (MSTAHRS, 2020).