Trauma center
hospital equipped to handle major traumatic injuries
A trauma center, or trauma centre, is a hospital equipped and staffed to provide care for patients suffering from major traumatic injuries such as falls, motor vehicle collisions, or gunshot wounds. The term "trauma center" may be used incorrectly to refer to an emergency department (also known as a "casualty department" or "accident and emergency") that lacks the presence of specialized services or certification to care for victims of major trauma.
In the United States, a hospital can receive trauma center status by meeting specific criteria established by the American College of Surgeons (ACS) and passing a site review by the Verification Review Committee. Official designation as a trauma center is determined by individual state law provisions. Trauma centers vary in their specific capabilities and are identified by "Level" designation, Level I (Level-1) being the highest and Level III (Level-3) being the lowest (some states have four or five designated levels).
The highest levels of trauma centers have access to specialist medical and nursing care, including emergency medicine, trauma surgery, oral and maxillofacial surgery, critical care, neurosurgery, orthopedic surgery, anesthesiology, and radiology, as well as a wide variety of highly specialized and sophisticated surgical and diagnostic equipment. The point of a trauma center, as distinguished from an ordinary hospital, is to maintain the ability to rush critically injured patients into surgery during the golden hour by ensuring that appropriate personnel and equipment are always ready to go on short notice. Lower levels of trauma centers may be able to provide only initial care and stabilization of a traumatic injury and arrange for transfer of the patient to a higher level of trauma care. Receiving care at a trauma center lowers the risk of death by approximately 25% compared to care at non-trauma hospitals.
The operation of a trauma center is often expensive and some areas may be underserved by trauma centers because of that expense.
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Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 13, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q2473971. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference.
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This entry incorporates text from “Trauma center” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.