DANIEL STEPHENS: I'm Dr. Stephens. I'm one of the trauma surgeons here at Mayo Clinic in Rochester and with this being Trauma Awareness Month, I wanted to introduce everyone to the organization called SMRTAC or S-M-R-T-A-C.
That's a long acronym, but in summary, it's the Southern Minnesota Regional Trauma Advisory Committee. And what we do is we're a large collaboration of over 25 agencies in 21 counties in Southern Minnesota. And this includes all the hospitals within this region, as well as EMS agencies, law enforcement and state trauma designation coordinators.
We try to lead Minnesota and seamless trauma care across the continuum from pre-injury to rehabilitation, lead and trauma prevention, education and outreach, and we provide collaborative participation through SMRTAC. Some of the programs that SMRTAC participates in include the Stop The Bleed trauma education, including rural trauma courses, topic course, trauma program manager courses, as well as the Minnesota Towards Zero Death. I think the value is that we coordinate care between a lot of different institutions, really having a collaborative approach between pre-hospital care providers as well as hospital care providers and really standardize the care throughout the entire region.
One of the big things about trauma is that it affects disproportionate number of young people. And the disability and life lost due to trauma is significant and it didn't really slow down just because of the pandemic. So improvements that we can make in trauma and injury prevention have a really exponential effect because of that.