Operative Trauma and Mortality: The Role of Volume

Introduction: Operative volume is associated with improved outcomes across many surgical specialties, but this relationship has not been illustrated clearly in trauma. This study sought to evaluate the relationship between operative trauma volume and mortality, hypothesizing that increased volume would be associated with improved survival.

Materials and methods: The National Trauma Data Bank was queried for patients ≥18 y undergoing hemorrhage control surgery at level I or II trauma centers from 2017 to 2020. Hierarchical logistic regression was performed to evaluate the association between operative volume and in-hospital mortality, controlling for demographic and clinical characteristics.

Results: 55,469 patients were included and treated at 516 centers. After adjustment, the operative volume was significantly associated with reduced mortality (OR 0.999, 95% CI 0.997-0.999, P = 0.018). However, there was considerable variability in volumes, with the busiest 5% of centers performing 90-294 operations per year, compared to 7-35 in the middle 50% of centers. To evaluate whether volume exhibited a uniform effect, the top 5% of trauma centers were excluded on subset analysis, with operative volume becoming nonsignificant in the remaining 491 centers (OR 0.999, 95% CI 0.996-1.001, P = 0.274).

Conclusions: Higher operative trauma volume is associated with reduced mortality for patients undergoing hemorrhage control surgery, but this mortality benefit appears to arise solely from very high-volume centers. The time-sensitive nature of hemorrhage control surgery makes centralization at this level impractical. Future efforts should focus on investigating the relationship between patient proximity to trauma centers and center volume as well as identifying modifiable factors common to high-volume centers that may be widely implemented.