DAVROS Study Lay Summary

Emergency care systems, which involve ambulances, hospitals and general practitioners, have a crucial role to play in providing life-saving treatments. These systems can be organised in different ways and it is often difficult to tell which way is best. Simply looking at survival rates for patients treated by different systems can be very misleading. If very ill patients use the system, then survival rates may be low even though the system itself provides high quality care. Researchers need a fair way of comparing different emergency care systems.

The DAVROS Study aims to provide this. DAVROS will develop a method for comparing the survival rates of different systems that takes into account the type of patients using the system. The DAVROS method will allow researchers to distinguish variations in survival rate due to differences in the care provided from variations due to differences in the type of patients treated.

To do this, DAVROS needs to identify which patient characteristics accurately predict a patient's chances of survival. For example, research shows that a conscious patient treated by the emergency system is more likely to survive than an unconscious patient. This is just one example and there are obviously many others.

The DAVROS Study will select characteristics that predict survival and then test them in real life. DAVROS researchers will use statistical techniques to develop a score (the DAVROS Score) that predicts each patient's chances of survival. By comparing the predicted chances of survival to actual survival, the researchers can impartially judge the performance of different emergency care systems. This approach can be used to monitor the performance of systems over time, or to research which types of system provide the best care for patients.