From battlefield to civvie street

A unique £20m trauma research centre which will bring together military and civilian specialists to share innovation and clinical practice has opened in Birmingham. The National Institute of Health Research (NIHR) for surgical reconstruction and microbiology, based at the Queen Elizabeth hospital, is the first collaboration of its kind between the NHS, the Ministry of Defence, the University of Birmingham and University Hospitals Birmingham. The centre hopes to address discrepancies between traumatic injury survival rates between soldiers and civilians: a soldier suffering a major traumatic injury in Iraq or Afghanistan will have an "unexpected survival" rate of 26%, but for a civilian in Britain suffering similar trauma the figure drops to 6%. Some 20,000 people suffer traumatic injury each year and while pioneering techniques have been developed by medical staff dealing with terrible injuries on the frontline, lessons have not always been shared with the NHS. The new unit will look at resuscitation techniques, surgical and wound care and regenerative medicine. Specialists said techniques, such as "damage control" – a naval term for keeping a holed ship afloat adopted by frontline medics to describe techniques which do a minimum to keep patients alive or save limbs in the first crucial hours after injury – are transferable to civilian practice. Sir Keith Porter, the UK's only professor of clinical traumatology and a consultant at the Queen Elizabeth hospital, where all injured service personnel are currently treated after evacuation from the frontline in Afghanistan, will take over as interim chair of the new institute. Julie Moore, chief executive of University Hospitals Birmingham NHS Foundation Trust, said the insitute was the result of a number of years work undertaken by the trust and others in this area. "[The centre] will provide us with the opportunity to build academic knowledge around pioneering clinical innovations, often performed for the first time to save lives and limbs," she said. "It will also allow us to use and develop basic science techniques to then critically examine and translate into clinical practice for the benefits of patients." The MoD has provided £10m of funding over the next 10 years and both the Department of Health and University Hospitals Birmingham and the University of Birmingham investing £5m each over the next five years. The health secretary, Andrew Lansley, said the £20m investment, reflected a strong committment to health research. "This investment will help to strengthen the response of health and emergency services to major disasters such as road traffic accidents and terrorist attacks in the future," he said. "It will also help to make the NHS leaders in the world of trauma care – helping to improve treatment and care in the NHS and around the world."