A critical element in matching health care resources to severity of injury is the ability to categorise hospitals and
other location based providers of injury care according to their capabilities. This process has been undertaken in other
countries and resulted in a description of “levels of care”. A principle underlying such categorisation is that any given
facility should receive enough trauma patients to be able to maintain the skills, experience and expertise of both the staff
and system. In some respects the relative singularity of location to which trauma cases can be taken in a given geographic area makes the description of levels of care somewhat irrelevant in the NZ setting. However the Ministry of Health has undertaken such a levelling exercise. The subsequent description of levels of care largely fitted the existing healthcare
delivery landscape and did not result in changes in practice.
Nearly 10 years on, inter-hospital transfers are more com-
mon but are often based on the geographical address of the
patient’s residence, rather than the initial severity of their in-
juries. The rapid, early transfer of patients due to severity or
injury type to the most appropriate hospital is not an integral
part of early patient management protocols in many institu-
tions. The suspicion (unvalidated because of the absence of
a national trauma registry) exists that improvements in pa-
tient care might be possible if more inter-hospital transfer
of cases of severe injury occurred.
The delivery of hospital based trauma care in NZ occurs
at the following levels.