Revised Trauma Score

The Revised Trauma Score (RTS) is a physiologic scoring system based on the initial vital signs of a patient.[1] A lower score indicates a higher severity of injury.[2]

Revised Trauma Score
Purposephysiologic scoring system

Use in triage

The Revised Trauma Score is made up of three categories: Glasgow Coma Scale, systolic blood pressure, and respiratory rate. The score range is 0–12. In START triage, 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.[citation needed]

Scoring

The score is as follows:[3]

Glasgow Coma Scale
GCSPoints
15–134
12–93
8–62
5–41
30
Systolic Blood Pressure
SBPPoints
>894
76–893
50–752
1–491
00
Respiratory Rate
RRPoints
10-294
>293
6–92
1–51
00

These three scores (Glasgow Coma Scale, Systolic Blood Pressure, Respiratory Rate) are then used to take the weighted sum by RTS = 0.9368 GCSP + 0.7326 SBPP + 0.2908 RRP 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