More than 12 million people in the U.S. live with the effects of a traumatic brain injury, according the Brain Injury Association of America. A person with a severe brain injury may need to be hospitalized and have long term health issues that affect memory, learning, coordination and balance, speech, hearing, vision, and emotions. Most [...]
Our Office of Injury Prevention has released the 2014 Traumatic Brain Injury report that shows deaths and inpatient hospitalizations have decreased in Arizona by about 15 percent since 2010, but more people are being seen in emergency departments. A traumatic brain injury is caused by a bump, blow, or jolt to the head, or by [...]
Last year we created Arizona’s Excellence in Pre-hospital Injury Care project- which is aimed at improving brain injury outcomes in AZ. The National Institutes of Health chose AZ as the only state to evaluate the national standards for pre-hospital emergency care of brain injury. Since we got started about a year ago- we’ve recruited almost 100 [...]
Traumatic brain injury is involved in about 1/3 of all injury-related deaths- it’s clearly a public health issue. That’s why we created Arizona's Excellence in Pre-hospital Injury Care project- which is aimed at improving brain injury outcomes in AZ. The National Institutes of Health chose AZ as the only state to evaluate the national standards [...]
We just found out that AZ had 3 oral abstracts accepted (including the #1 scored abstract) for this year’s National Association of EMS Physicians meeting. Of the 208 abstracts submitted, only 15 were selected for oral presentations. We get to do 3 because AZ submitted 3 of the top 15 scored abstracts. Our Statewide Cardiac Receiving Center abstract was the [...]
This month has been a doozy for our Bureau of Emergency Medical Services and Trauma System team. This week we finished the 2nd of 2 high-profile and important decisions. A couple of weeks ago I made a decision to let Yuma City take over part of the ambulance response in that town. I thought the city [...]
Approximately 20,000 folks are seen in the AZ emergency departments for a Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI). Of these 1,000 die and 4,500 are hospitalized. At least 2% of the U.S. population has a TBI-related long-term need for help to perform activities of daily living. So, needless to say, brain injury is a major public health issue. There’s growing [...]
