Acute management of adults following chest wall injury: An assessment of institutional clinical practice guidelines across the UK and synthesis of care recommendations

This is the authors' abstract. We don't add key points for this paper.

OBJECTIVE: Chest wall injury causes significant morbidity and mortality. There is uncertainty regarding many aspects of clinical care for these patients, including optimal analgesia, acuity of monitoring and surgical fixation. Our aim in this work is to [1] objectively appraise the quality and extent of heterogeneity in UK major trauma centre (MTC) clinical practice guidelines regarding the management of chest wall injury; and [2] narratively summarise clinical and care process recommendations from these guidelines to provide a comparative description of recommendations between institutions. METHODS: All major trauma centres in England and Wales were contacted for their institutional clinical practice guidelines relevant to chest wall injury. A literature search was executed seeking eligible supra-regional, national or international consensus documents or guidelines to serve as reference standards. Interrogation of the reference standard guidelines was performed to identify key clinical and care processes against which two blinded assessors judged the clinical validity of institutional clinical practice guidelines as part of the Appraisal of Guidelines for Research & Evaluation II Global Rating Scale (AGREE II-GRS) tool. RESULTS: completeness score 2.63 (1.75-5.25) respectively). CONCLUSIONS: This work highlights the paucity of high-quality local clinical practice guidelines to inform the management of adults with chest wall injury admitted to UK MTCs. Although some degree of variation between local guidelines is acceptable, we have identified substantial heterogeneity in the clinical care recommendations between institutions.