Casualties of peace: an analysis of casualties admitted to the intensive care unit during the negotiation of the compreh
- PDF / 559,633 Bytes
- 8 Pages / 595.276 x 790.866 pts Page_size
- 75 Downloads / 208 Views
RESEARCH ARTICLE
Open Access
Casualties of peace: an analysis of casualties admitted to the intensive care unit during the negotiation of the comprehensive Colombian process of peace Carlos A. Ordoñez1,2, Ramiro Manzano-Nunez1,3, Maria Paula Naranjo1,3, Esteban Foianini6* , Cecibel Cevallos2, Maria Alejandra Londoño4, Alvaro I. Sanchez Ortiz1,3, Alberto F. García1,2 and Ernest E. Moore5
Abstract Background: After 52 years of war in 2012, the Colombian government began the negotiation of a process of peace, and by November 2012, a truce was agreed. We sought to analyze casualties who were admitted to the intensive care unit (ICU) before and during the period of the negotiation of the comprehensive Colombian process of peace. Methods: Retrospective study of hostile casualties admitted to the ICU at a Level I trauma center from January 2011 to December 2016. Patients were subsequently divided into two groups: those seen before the declaration of the process of peace truce (November 2012) and those after (November 2012–December 2016). Patients were compared with respect to time periods. Results: Four hundred forty-eight male patients were admitted to the emergency room. Of these, 94 required ICU care. Sixty-five casualties presented before the truce and 29 during the negotiation period. Median injury severity score was significantly higher before the truce. Furthermore, the odds of presenting with severe trauma (ISS > 15) were significantly higher before the truce (OR, 5.4; (95% CI, 2.0–14.2); p < 0.01). There was a gradual decrease in the admissions to the ICU, and the performance of medical and operative procedures during the period observed. Conclusion: We describe a series of war casualties that required ICU care in a period of peace negotiation. Despite our limitations, our study presents a decline in the occurrence, severity, and consequences of war injuries probably as a result in part of the negotiation of the process of peace. The hysteresis of these results should only be interpreted for their implications in the understanding of the peace-health relationship and must not be overinterpreted and used for any political end. Keywords: Wounds and injuries, Military personnel, Peace, Casualties, Trauma, Critical care, Critical care outcomes
* Correspondence: [email protected]; [email protected] 6 Department of Surgery, Clinica Foianini, Santacruz de la Sierra, Bolivia Full list of author information is available at the end of the article © The Author(s). 2018 Open Access This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in
Data Loading...
