The Revised Trauma Score (RTS) is a physiologic scoring system based on the initial

vital signs Vital signs (also known as vitals) are a group of the four to six most crucial medical signs that indicate the status of the body's vital (life-sustaining) functions. These measurements are taken to help assess the general physical health of a ...

of a patient. A lower score indicates a higher severity of injury.

Use in triage

The Revised Trauma Score is made up of three categories:

Glasgow Coma Scale The Glasgow Coma Scale (GCS) is a clinical scale used to reliably measure a person's level of consciousness after a brain injury. The GCS assesses a person based on their ability to perform eye movements, speak, and move their body. These three ...

, systolic blood pressure, and respiratory rate. The score range is 0–12. In

START Start can refer to multiple topics: *Takeoff, the phase of flight where an aircraft transitions from moving along the ground to flying through the air * Starting lineup in sports * Standing start, and rolling start, in an auto race Acronyms * ...

triage In medicine, triage () is a practice invoked when acute care cannot be provided for lack of resources. The process rations care towards those who are most in need of immediate care, and who benefit most from it. More generally it refers to pri ...

, a patient with an RTS score of 12 is labeled delayed, 11 is urgent, and 3–10 is immediate. Those who have an RTS below 3 are declared dead and should not receive certain care because they are highly unlikely to survive without a significant amount of resources.

Scoring

The score is as follows: These three scores (Glasgow Coma Scale, Systolic Blood Pressure, Respiratory Rate) are then used to take the weighted sum by RTS = 0.9368 GCS + 0.7326 SBP + 0.2908 RR. Values for the RTS are in the range 0 to 7.8408. The RTS is heavily weighted towards the Glasgow Coma Scale to compensate for major head injury without multisystem injury or major physiological changes. A threshold of RTS < 4 has been proposed to identify those patients who should be treated in a trauma centre, although this value may be somewhat low.

References

External links

Online Calculator of the Revised Trauma Score
{{Trauma , state=autocollapse Diagnostic emergency medicine Medical scales Medical assessment and evaluation instruments Orthopedic clinical prediction rules Triage