How does the BDMS Trauma Center work in conjunction with other BDMS hospitals?

Bangkok Dusit Medical Services PLC (BDMS) is the largest healthcare provider in Thailand, comprising more than 50 hospitals in Thailand and 2 in Cambodia. Each hospital has an emergency room to take care of the emergency and trauma patients. However, it is a responsibility to make sure that all hospitals in the BDMS hospital network offer the high standard of trauma and emergency care. I would like to explain that the emergency room is different from what we call a trauma centre. The high standard of trauma system needs:

• Pre-hospital care with the ambulance service and teams of medical staff to be ready on alert to dispatch from the hospital to the scene of accident as soon as possible

• The teams of medical personnel have to be able to provide the appropriate emergency treatment to stabilise the patient and bring the patient to the emergency room

• The emergency room must be fully equipped, and the medical personnel, such as emergency physicians and general surgeons, must be able to treat all life-threatening conditions

The major benefit of BDMS is the network of hospitals that can serve and treat trauma patients of different degrees of severity. When a receiving hospital cannot treat a major complex multisystem injury, the patient can be transferred to a hospital with the higher level and facility or send a team of surgeons to treat the patient.

What specialist services does the Center provide to international and domestic patients?

In every trauma centre, there is a team consisting of a general surgeon as the leader and other medical specialties such as a neurosurgeon, orthopaedic surgeons, anaesthesiologist, emergency physician and nurse. For trauma patients, usually there are injuries to more than one organ system, so it is necessary to work as a multidisciplinary team to provide the best possible care. We give the same treatment to any patient who comes into our hospital, and many hospitals are in touristic areas such as Chiang Mai, Phuket, Samui, and Pattaya.

How does the Center ensure that its staff are able to work seamlessly in the sphere of international travel and health insurance?

Any person who needs emergency care for a life-threatening condition when they arrive comes into our hospital network. Our motto is to treat first, no question, so it doesn’t matter who you are. After stabilising the patient in a safe condition, there will be a support service for further treatment.

How do you ensure that the quality of your services never drops?

In our trauma network, we have set up a code of practice to standardise care for each injury. There are regular meetings to share experience and good practice. The staff of trauma teams, including doctors and nurses, have mandatory courses to attend and perform many lifesaving procedures. In order to maintain the skills for all procedures, we have set up in-house training for different scenarios and to do the practice in the models. In order to reassure for the standard of the trauma system, many trauma centres in BDMS have accreditation from the Royal College of Surgeons of Thailand.

Your proposition is ‘1 Life, 7 days, 24 hours’ – can you explain what this means for patients and for insurance companies?

Every person has only one life, lives seven days a week and 24 hours a day. You never know when an accident may happen. At the BDMS Trauma Center, our trauma team members have to be ready every minute to provide an emergency service in order to save the life of the patients because every minute counts. This is the reason we use the number 1724 as the contact number for emergency services. There is evidence to prove that an effective trauma system will reduce the mortality of injured patients. However, building a highstandard trauma centre requires vision and commitment from the administrator; dedication and passion from the trauma team; good infrastructure and support from many services. BDMS is the only group of hospitals in the private sector to take on this challenge to raise the standard of trauma care for the injured patient.