Six years ago, an expert panel made a strong suggestion to the White House: set up a national system to care for patients with traumatic injuries, which lead to about 30,000 deaths every year. “In the civilian sector, where injury is the leading cause of death for Americans under age 46, as many as 1 in 5 deaths from traumatic injuries may be preventable with optimal trauma care,” the authors wrote.
A national system has yet to emerge, but new research published in the Journal of the American Medical Association has found that access to trauma care improved in the 2010s. The study mapped the distance from each census block to the nearest trauma center, taking into account air and land transport. The researchers found that 91% of people in the U.S. could get to a trauma center within 60 minutes by air or land travel, up from 78% in 2013.