Abstract
Trauma surgery is inherently a decision intense specialty and trauma surgeons make impactful decisions on a nearly constant basis. Rarely are sufficient data and time available to weigh options, thus the individual trauma surgeon is left to act based on his or her best judgment and experience. Decision-making is not a homogeneous process with widely agreed-upon principles and processes and there has been little research into how trauma surgeons make decisions. The current state of decision-making in trauma surgery consists of making do without either comprehensive baseline data or the luxury of enough time to gather needed information. Although consensus guidelines and algorithms are helpful, trauma surgeons must still make decisions on a regular basis without the benefit of a full dataset and under time pressures. This chapter attempts to provide an overview of theoretical constructs proposed for modeling decision-making, incorporate a brief review of the evolution of trauma decision-making, and incorporate the author’s personal viewpoints as a practicing trauma surgeon.
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Fakhry, S.M. (2016). Trauma Surgeon Decision-Making: Surviving Outside the Realm of the Evidence Based. In: Surgical Decision Making. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-29824-5_13
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-29824-5_13
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