Clinical Practice Guidelines (CPGs)
Clinical Process Guidelines (CPGs) are a pillar of the United States (US) Military’s Joint Trauma System (JTS). CPGs provide guidance to clinicians providing trauma and emergency care in the deployed environment around the management of various injury types/emergency medical conditions. CPGs serve numerous functions including:
i) Standardization of care and adherence to evidence-based care processes
ii) Improvement in clinical performance/care quality
iii) Longitudinal monitoring of patient outcomes including impact assessment associated with various interventions.
Though deployed clinicians frequently provide care under austere conditions, the JTS CPGs are developed for casualties receiving care within a well-resourced military trauma system. The care of civilian casualties in conflict occurs within dramatically different set of resource constraints. Such differences include limited resource availability both with respect to equipment/materials and subspecialist expertise, limited critical care capabilities, limited organized modes of patient transport and lack of options for evacuation to higher echelons of care. With these differences in mind, the Explosive Weapons Trauma Care Collective (EXTRACCT) will develop a library of CPGs relevant to the care of civilian victims of blast injury in low-resource settings (LRS). These will be adapted from military CPGs in a manner that is appropriate to the available material and human resources of LRS.
For more information, click the link below to download our CPG Development Process.