Introduction: The result of treatment of victims with severe injuries depends on the timely emergency medical care provided. Errors and treatment defects made in the pre-hospital stage affect the final result of treatment and cannot be corrected later, even if high quality care is provided. That is why it is necessary to pay special attention to the pre-hospital period of medical care for the injured.

Aim: Study of the duration of prehospital stage of medical care for victims with concomitant skeletal trauma.

Materials and methods: We studied the characteristics of emergency medical care for 108 people with polysystemic and multiple organ injuries. The average age of the victims was 35.6 ± 1.45 years.

Results: One of the main characteristics of emergency medical care is the duration of the pre-hospital period. It was found that only 9.3 % of the victims were hospitalized within 30 minutes and another 33.3 % were delivered within 30 to 60 minutes. The largest group (41.7 %) consisted of victims with a pre-hospital phase of 1 to 3 hours. Victims who were hospitalized more than 3 hours after injury accounted for 13.9 %. In 2 victims (1.9 %), the time of injury could not be established. In the overall study array, the mean duration of the prehospital phase was (74.2 ± 16.8) minutes; the minimum time from injury to hospitalization was 17 minutes, and in 3 cases hospitalization occurred in more than 12 hours. Such indicators cannot be considered satisfactory, since the optimal time of admission to a medical institution is the first hour after injury; however, most of the victims (55.6%) with severe trauma received qualified medical care outside the “golden hour”, which significantly reduces its effectiveness. More than 13.9 % of the victims were hospitalized late – more than 3 hours. These were mostly patients who, for various reasons, did not seek medical care in time.

Conclusions: The duration of the pre-hospital period in 55.6% of patients with severe trauma is suboptimal. There is an opportunity to improve the quality of emergency medical care for this category of victims, primarily by reducing the pre-hospital time.