Are we prepared for high standards of trauma care?

For some years emergency nurses have speculated about what a competent standard of emergency nursing should look like. This is particularly important when managing complex trauma cases. The Trauma Quality Improvement Network System (TQuINS) was created to assess whether trauma care is safe and carried out by practitioners proficient in dealing with complex cases. The trauma nursing competencies are part of NHS England’s national trauma review programme and the national major trauma nursing group was launched in April to set clear and unambiguous standards of emergency nursing. By September 2016, the knowledge and training of nurses in all UK emergency departments (EDs) that accept trauma patients will have been assessed against these new standards.