Revised Trauma Score

The Revised Trauma Score (RTS) is a physiologic scoring system, designed for use in based on the initial vital signs of a patient. A lower score indicates a higher severity of injury.

Use in triage

File:RTS Fast Ref Chart.jpg

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The Revised Trauma Score is made up of a 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 10-3 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:

Glasgow Coma Scale GCS Points 15-13 4 12-9 3 8-6 2 5-4 1 3 0

Systolic Blood Pressure SBP Points >89 4 76-89 3 50-75 2 1-49 1 0 0

Respiratory Rate RR Points 10-29 4 >29 3 6-9 2 1-5 1 0 0

These three scores (Glasgow Coma Scale, Systolic Blood, Pressure Respiratory) 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.