Abstract
A law revised in May 2012 provided support to regional and emergency centers for reducing the risk of preventable deaths. In particular, regional trauma centers have been established throughout the nation, with the goal of ensuring that any trauma patient can reach a trauma center within an hour. As a multidisciplinary approach is particularly important in treating severe trauma patients, activation teams are currently organized at each center to perform multiple simultaneous treatments. Under the present system, only 7 departments can participate in these trauma teams; emergency medicine, cardiothoracic surgery, general surgery, orthopedic surgery, neurosurgery, radiology, and anesthesiology. Plastic surgeons also play an essential role in treating trauma patients, and in fact currently treat many such cases. Especially in reconstruction procedures in patients with head and neck trauma and wide tissue defects, plastic surgeons possess unique expertise. However, since plastic surgeons are excluded from the trauma response teams due to institutional limitations, we describe the role and necessity of plastic surgery for trauma and emergency patients, and urge that the system be improved.
References
1. Yoon HD. Background and progress of regional trauma center development. J Korean Med Assoc 2016;59:919–922.
2. Ministry of Health and Welfare. Guide for installation of regional trauma center for 2013 [Internet] Sejong: Ministry of Health and Welfare; 2013. cited 2018 Oct 15. Available from:
http://www.mohw.go.kr/react/index.jsp.
3. Semer NB, Sullivan SR, Meara JG. Plastic surgery and global health: how plastic surgery impacts the global burden of surgical disease. J Plast Reconstr Aesthet Surg 2010;63:1244–1248.
4. Gupta A, Niyazi MS, Tiwari VK. A historical review of the reconstruction of hand injuries. Arch Plast Surg 2017;44:472–473.
5. Sabino JM, Slater J, Valerio IL. Plastic surgery challenges in war wounded I: flap-based extremity reconstruction. Adv Wound Care (New Rochelle) 2016;5:403–411.
6. Kwasnicki RM, Hughes-Hallett A, Marcus HJ, Yang GZ, Darzi A, Hettiaratchy S. Fifty years of innovation in plastic surgery. Arch Plast Surg 2016;43:145–152.
7. National Emergency Medical Center. 2016 Emergency medi-cal statistics yearbook [Internet] Seoul: National Emergency Medical Center; 2017. cited 2018 Oct 15. Available from:
http://www.e-gen.or.kr/nemc/main.do.
8. Ministry of Health and Welfare. Guideline for operation of regional trauma center for 2016 [Internet] Sejong: Ministry of Health and Welfare; 2016. cited 2018 Oct 15. Available from:
http://www.mohw.go.kr/react/index.jsp.
9. Ministry of Health and Welfare. Changes to the operation cost of the regional trauma center [Internet] Sejong: Ministry of Health and Welfare; 2018. cited 2018 Oct 15. Available from:
http://www.mohw.go.kr/react/index.jsp.
10. Barone M, Cogliandro A, Persichetti P. Ethics and plastic surgery/what is plastic surgery? Arch Plast Surg 2017;44:90–92.
11. Choi J. Faces of the face. Arch Plast Surg 2017;44:251–256.
12. Yun S, Na Y. Panfacial bone fracture: cephalic to caudal. Arch Craniofac Surg 2018;19:1–2.
13. Kim J, Choi JH, Chung YK, Kim SW. Panfacial bone fracture and medial to lateral approach. Arch Craniofac Surg 2016;17:181–185.
14. Kim HS, Kim SE, Lee HT. Management of Le Fort I fracture. Arch Craniofac Surg 2017;18:5–8.
15. Jeon BJ, Lee JI, Roh SY, Kim JS, Lee DC, Lee KJ. Analysis of 344 hand injuries in a pediatric population. Arch Plast Surg 2016;43:71–76.
16. Roy M, Plant MA, Snell L. A shark attack treated in a tertiary care centre: case report and review of the literature. Arch Plast Surg 2018;45:80–84.
