Simplify your job: Focusing first on fatal trauma saves time and reduces complications. Of your total EMS reports, probably less than five percent are fatalities. Of these, only a small percentage is traumatic. Collecting, sorting and investigating traumatic fatalities involve much less work and time than going through all the non-fatal reports.

When EMS doesn’t work, prevention may be the answer: There are many reasons that people don’t survive any traumatic event, some can be addressed with improved EMS, most cannot. Where EMS fails, prevention may succeed. Proactive EMS gives you a new and powerful tool to prevent unnecessary traumatic death.

Start with the worst problems first: A recurring pattern of fatal traumatic events indicates that a hazard exists that will continue to kill people until someone does something about it. Think of it as making the scene safe on a bigger scale.

Motor vehicle crashes often have a specific cause that can be targeted: Road hazards are frequently the cause of fatal motor vehicle crashes. These hazards can be identified and fixed. Intentional injuries such as homicides and suicides combined are now more prevalent than deaths by motor vehicle crashes, but they are complex events that tend to be more behavior related and less likely to have a specific identifiable hazard associated with them. So far the most clearly identifiable factor in intentional injuries is the availability of a gun.

Fatal motor vehicle crashes are well documented: The Highway Patrol, Coroner, and Department Of Transportation have thorough records on every motor vehicle fatality. This assures that there are plenty of alternate information sources and additional data sets available. You will need at least one matching data set to validate your findings.

People remember fatalities: Interviewing bystanders, locals, responders and crewmembers are easier when people clearly remember the situation. Where were you on 9/11/01?