Helping Trauma Programs Review and Identify Appropriate Usage of Non-Surgical Admits

About:

The Nelson Screening Tool was developed to help trauma programs accurately identify non-surgical admissions that should have been admitted to surgical services. Based on the framework described in Nonsurgical Admissions With Traumatic Injury: Medical Patients Are Trauma Patients Too (Nelson et al., Journal of Trauma Nursing, 2018), this Excel-based resource guides teams through a step-by-step screening process to determine how to abstract the Nelson Score field in the trauma registry (if captured) and can also be utilized to help meet VRC Standard 7.8 – Non-Surgical Trauma Admission appropriateness.

The tool includes a structured question set, automated scoring logic, and clearly marked entry fields to help teams quickly and consistently assess nonsurgical admissions with traumatic injury. Programs can use this resource to strengthen compliance and spend less time reviewing the intricacies of all Non-Surgical Admissions, focusing instead on the outliers that require additional review to determine appropriate admission status.

Simply enter patient responses on the template sheet, review the calculated Nelson Score, and determine whether the patient meets inclusion criteria — all in a clean, user-friendly format.

Key Takeaways:

• Provides a standardized method for determining Nelson inclusion status
• Based on the validated screening approach published by Nelson et al. (2018)
• Helps identify nonsurgical admissions that should have been admitted to trauma/surgical services
• Auto-calculates Nelson Score based on user responses
• Includes clear instructions and protected calculation fields
• Easy-to-use Excel resource developed by registry and trauma experts