Revised Trauma Score

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

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.

Scoring

The score is as follows:

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

External links

• Online Calculator of the Revised Trauma Score