DOI: https://doi.org/10.4414/smw.2014.14002
With great interest we have read the excellent publication in the recent SMW from our dear colleagues Catherine Heim et al. from the University Hospital of Lausanne on trauma patients from their local registry [1].
Anyhow we would like to bring to your attention the last sentence of the introduction section, were the authors state the following:
“To our knowledge, this is the first comprehensive report about internationally comparable medical data on trauma admissions to a Swiss trauma center.”
This statement is not correct, as our group has published a report on Swiss trauma patients in your journal in February 2014 stating: “Characteristics of Swiss trauma patients derived from TARN were described for the first time, providing a detailed overview of the institutional trauma population” [2].
Whereas our local patient trauma data are submitted to the UK based Trauma Audit and Research Network (TARN) and are internationally benchmarked / audited, the University Hospital of Lausanne runs successfully to our best knowledge their own local trauma registry.
Therefore, this would be perhaps, the first report on an exclusively Swiss based trauma registry, but in no way the first report on Swiss trauma registry patients, as claimed.
We would therefore like to kindly ask you to ask the authors to publish a corrigendum, or change the sentence in the introduction section of the online (full) version of the manuscript.
1 Heim C, Bosisio F, Roth A, Bloch J, Borenset O, et al. Is trauma in Switzerland any different? Epidemiology and patterns of injury in major trauma ‒ a five year review from a Swiss trauma centre. Swiss Med Wkly. 2014;144:w13958 http://www.smw.ch/content/smw-2014-13958/ .
2 Hasler RM, Srivastava D, Aghayev E, Keel MJ, Exadaktylos AK, Schnüriger B. First results from a Swiss level I trauma centre participating in the UK Trauma Audit and Research Network (TARN): prospective cohort study. Swiss Med Wkly. 2014;144:w13910. http://www.smw.ch/content/smw-2014-13910/