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Course materials for ATLS arrive four weeks before the course at the latest. Memory science suggests that is enough time to pass but too little to remember. We weigh the evidence on when to start, steelman the case for cramming, and show how to revise well before the manual arrives.
A Lancet Global Health study of 8,858 injured patients found that arriving by ambulance was linked to worse outcomes and prior contact with the health system to better ones. We test it against bypass orthodoxy, steelman the critics, and explain why ATLS was built for the hospital you drive past.
ATLS 11 moved its combat information into the core manual and turned ABCDE into xABCDE. Drone warfare in Ukraine shows why it matters: the golden hour evacuation is unachievable, but tourniquets left on for hours cost limbs. So what should trauma clinicians (and ATLS practitioners) do now?
E-scooter trauma admissions nearly doubled in new US data, and UK registry work shows a striking excess of brain injury, with children hurt worst at lower speeds. We examine what the numbers really show, why a slow scooter makes a fast head, the case against alarm, and what it means for ATLS.
There are many clinicians who excel in the moulage and stall on the MCQs. We review the evidence on learning styles, knowing versus doing and the enactment effect, then set out a practical ATLSMCQ method for doers facing the ATLS written test.
We look at four published cohorts - Arizona (744 candidates, 10.5% failure), the UAE (1,041), Saudi Arabia (603, 36.6% failure) and a January 2026 Chicago dataset (996, 19% marginal performance) - all of which identify pretest score as an independent predictor of ATLS course performance. We set that against RCS England's actual exam parameters, and translate the spaced-repetition and retrieval-practice evidence into a four-week revision schedule.
In the US, trauma surgery is a named specialty facing a staffing crisis; in the UK it barely exists as a career. After this week's AAST meeting, and as England allocates up to 4,500 new training posts, we ask whether Britain's modest trauma surgeon reflects a failure of ambition.
Machines have learned to find free fluid on a FAST scan with 91% sensitivity - comfortably better than the humans holding the probe. The awkward question is what we are automating: in thirty years of randomised trials, nobody has shown that performing a FAST changes what happens to a trauma patient. And NICE already tells UK clinicians not to do it.
The 2026 DEVICE trauma analysis found video laryngoscopy beat direct laryngoscopy for first-pass intubation (88% vs 68%), and a Lancet causal-modelling study argues prehospital intubation cuts mortality in high-risk trauma. We weigh the evidence against ATLS 11 and give the safe exam answer.
Trainees who first learned cricothyroidotomy on realistic 3D-printed models succeeded 97% of the time versus 84% for those starting on smooth task trainers - despite being slower and less confident on the harder model.
A British randomised trial reported this year could not find a quality-of-life benefit from the hard collar after odontoid fracture - and could not finish recruiting, because clinicians had already stopped believing in it. A major review published in July 2026 arrives at a similar conclusion from the other direction. For anyone preparing for ATLS, the semi-rigid collar has become the most instructive controversy in trauma.
Two new studies reignite the blunt cerebrovascular injury screening debate: selective Denver criteria miss up to a third of injuries, but universal neck CTA found incidental abnormalities in one in seven patients screened, over a third of whom left hospital uninformed. What ATLS 11 teaches.