THE ANZTR AS A CLINICAL QUALITY REGISTRY

Operating since 2012, the ANZTR has established itself as a leading clinical quality registry (CQR). The Australian Commission on Safety and Quality in Health Care has promoted the importance of CQRs as drivers of quality improvement for over a decade, allocating trauma to the second highest priority due the high burden of disease, increasing costs and unsatisfactory outcomes associated with poor quality trauma care.

In 2016, funding for the Australian Trauma Registry was the number one recommendation from the Road Safety Senate Committee. Funding was subsequently obtained from the Department of Health and the Bureau of Infrastructure, Transport, and Regional Economies to support the registry’s core responsibilities and reporting. In 2018, New Zealand joined the collaboration to become the Australia New Zealand Trauma Registry (ANZTR), and the registry began providing risk adjusted outcomes.

The ANZTR is now a leading CQR, collecting pre-hospital and in-hospital data on the most severely injured patients, defined as an Injury Severity Score (ISS) greater than 12 or death following injury, from 27 Australian and seven New Zealand level 1 trauma centres. The ANZTR now has six years of quality Australian data from 1 July 2015 to 30 June 2021, and four years of New Zealand data from 1 July 2017 to 30 June 2021, and continues to recruit sites for the purpose of capturing population-based data for the severely injured.