Effectivity of the implementation of the initial assessment checklist in mountain accidents

Abstract

Background: mountain accidents are becoming a public health problem as consequence of pandemic lockdown, since society practises more mountain sports, and consequently, mountain accidents have increased. Among Spanish federated people occur an average of 7000 accidents a year, of which in 2020, of those assisted by GREIM, 4% found death, while in non-federated that data ascends to 8%. (1) The main cause of harm in mountain accidents are traumatisms, which are also the most common cause of death in the mountain. ABCDE (airway, breathing, circulatory, disability, exposure) is efficient to reduce mortality and to stablish a priority order to attend injuries (2) and checklist has been proved to be effective confronting procedures in complex situations. (3) Objective: our main objective is to evaluate the effectivity of a based-ABCDE checklist implementation. Our goal is to prove that people who were taught and trained how to read and interpret this checklist know how to manage better a traumatic mountain victim than people that were not taught nor given our checklist. Effectivity will be evaluated in two forms. One will be in terms of “knowledge” evidenced through marks differences among “pre-training” and “post-training” test exams. The other will be by studying specific clinical actions carried out in mountain victims and also, by studying victim’s mortality and disability. Design: we will carry out our research through a randomized, controlled, longitudinal, prospective open-label interventional study leaded by Mountain Medicine Chair from Universitat de Girona, from March 2022 to February 2026. Participants: our study subjects will be federated members of Federació d’Entitats Excursionistes de Catalunya (FEEC) and members of Federación Vasca de Montaña (EMF-FVM) from Basque Country. Methods: we will perform a probabilistic simple aleatory method. The 784 participants will be assigned randomly by 1:1 ratio to one or another group. Checklist implementation will be carried out in intervention group A n=392 but not in control group B n=392. Online test exams and clinical actions performed by our study subjects will be followed-up to a year after checklist implementation. To study disability, mountain victims will be followed-up to a year after their accident