Whole blood is the current bright, shiny thing in EMS medicine. It works in the hospital and is what our patients are bleeding out onto the road so it just seems to make sense that we should put back what they’re loosing. But… is it any better than blood components? That’s the question the authors of TOWAR tried to answer. One of those authors, Dr Frank Guyette, joins us for a two episode interview about this trial and about trials in general. 

Dr Guyette is an EM and EMS physician, medical director for STATMedEvac, and Professor of Emergency Medicine at University of Pittsburgh. He is also a research leaders with the LITES network, the parent network for the TOWAR trial. We discuss the challenges of conducting large, multi-center randomized controlled trials in episode I, including funding and the ethics of prehospital research. In episode II, we’ll jump into the details of the TOWAR trial itself.

Reference:
1. Sperry JL, Guyette FX, Cotton BA, et al.: Prehospital Resuscitation with Type O Whole Blood for Trauma and Hemorrhage. N Engl J Med. doi: 10.1056/NEJMoa2602167 (Epub ahead of print).