Australian Trauma Quality Improvement Program and the Australian Trauma Registry

This program relies on collaboration between the 26 designated major trauma centres and 2 state trauma registries in Australia and is aimed at improving the quality of care provided to severely injured patients by sharing quality improvement activities and enabling evidence based research through the use of trauma registry data.

The Australian Trauma Quality Improvement Program (AusTQIP) brings all of the designated major trauma centres together to share knowledge and experience from quality improvement programs under a governance structure representative of all states and territories. A key achievement was the agreement to collect data based on a standard Bi-National Trauma Minimum Dataset. AusTQIP collaborators have contributed data to the Australian Trauma Registry where aggregated information was used to publish a national report on presentations, processes of care and outcomes of trauma patients. With increasing collection of high quality registry data, further work will be undertaken to enhance the development of risk-adjusted models for benchmarking trauma centres, quality indicators and calculating the true costs of trauma care.