The Harborview Approach to Craniofacial Trauma

Craig Birgfeld, MD, FACS

The treatment of craniomaxillofacial trauma requires a wide range of highly specialized skills that are often shared across surgeons from various training backgrounds. While each specialist approaches facial trauma from a slightly different viewpoint based on their training, we at Harborview Medical Center believe that it is the cohesion of these subspecialties that provides the best care for patients who have suffered facial trauma. For this reason, we have chosen to produce this edition of Seminars in Plastic Surgery not only to focus on facial trauma, but also to highlight this multispecialty care. Each manuscript was created by surgeons from different backgrounds: oral and maxillofacial surgery, otolaryngology, plastic surgery, and ophthalmology. In this edition, we hope to share our various approaches to treating facial trauma, as we share in the care of the patients at Harborview Medical Center.

Harborview is the level 1 trauma center for Washington state as well as Alaska, Montana, and Idaho. We serve over 7 million people covering a land area approximately one-fourth of the United States. Harborview receives 6,000 trauma and burn admissions each year with 29% having an Injury Severity Score >15 and around 1,000 being pediatric patients. Over the past 3 years we have averaged 1,031 admissions with facial trauma, but many thousands more are treated and discharged from the emergency department each year and are therefore not in this official count. Because of this volume, complex craniofacial injuries are commonplace at Harborview and the care of these patients is shared amongst the services listed above.

I would like to thank all the authors who contributed manuscripts to this edition and hope you enjoyed working with authors from other specialties. We hope this edition will serve to improve the knowledge of our trainees and practicing surgeons and therefore improve their care for patients with facial trauma.

Publication History

Article published online:
19 November 2021