In February 2007 an Electronic Emergency Board was introduced into the Orthopaedic Department at Musgrove Park Hospital. The aims of this system were to replace the often disorganized handwritten trauma white-board and improve multidisciplinary communication.

The electronic board can be accessed from any computer terminal in the hospital and a large plasma screen is kept permanently on display in the orthopaedic theatre corridor. Emergency admissions are added by the on-call registrar before the morning trauma meeting and during the day the board is managed by our Trauma Coordinator.

We performed an informal survey of orthopaedic trauma departments in the South West region to ascertain current practices for organizing the trauma workload.

In summary we have introduced an electronic system for the organising and recording of all our trauma cases. We have found this system extremely beneficial to the smooth running of the orthopaedic trauma service.