Background Investigating the context of trauma and acute care surgery, the article aims at understanding the factors that can enhance some ethical aspects, namely the importance of patient consent, the perceptiveness of the ethical role of the trauma leader, and the perceived importance of ethics as an educational subject. Methods The article employs an international questionnaire promoted by the World Society of Emergency Surgery. Results Through the analysis of 402 fully filled questionnaires by surgeons from 72 different countries, the three main ethical topics are investigated through the lens of gender, membership of an academic or non-academic institution, an official trauma team, and a diverse group. In general terms, results highlight greater attention paid by surgeons belonging to academic institutions, official trauma teams, and diverse groups. Conclusions Our results underline that some organizational factors (e.g., the fact that the team belongs to a university context or is more diverse) might lead to the development of a higher sensibility on ethical matters. Embracing cultural diversity forces trauma teams to deal with different mindsets. Organizations should, therefore, consider those elements in defining their organizational procedures. Level of evidence Trauma and acute care teams work under tremendous pressure and complex circumstances, with their members needing to make ethical decisions quickly. The international survey allowed to shed light on how team assembly decisions might represent an opportunity to coordinate team member actions and increase performance.

Background: Emergency surgery represents a unique context. Trauma teams are often multidisciplinary and need to operate under extreme stress and time constraints, sometimes with no awareness of the trauma’s causes or the patient’s personal and clinical information. In this perspective, the dynamics of how trauma teams function is fundamental to ensuring the best performance and outcomes. Methods: An online survey was conducted among the World Society of Emergency Surgery members in early 2021. 402 fully filled questionnaires on the topics of knowledge translation dynamics and tools, non-technical skills, and difficulties in teamwork were collected. Data were analyzed using the software R, and reported following the Checklist for Reporting Results of Internet E-Surveys (CHERRIES). Results: Findings highlight how several surgeons are still unsure about the meaning and potential of knowledge translation and its mechanisms. Tools like training, clinical guidelines, and non-technical skills are recognized and used in clinical practice. Others, like patients’ and stakeholders’ engagement, are hardly implemented, despite their increasing importance in the modern healthcare scenario. Several difficulties in working as a team are described, including the lack of time, communication, training, trust, and ego. Discussion: Scientific societies should take the lead in offering training and support about the abovementioned topics. Dedicated educational initiatives, practical cases and experiences, workshops and symposia may allow mitigating the difficulties highlighted by the survey’s participants, boosting the performance of emergency teams. Additional investigation of the survey results and its characteristics may lead to more further specific suggestions and potential solutions.

Introduction: Quality in medical care must be measured in order to be improved. Trauma management is part of health care, and by definition, it must be checked constantly. The only way to measure quality and outcomes is to systematically accrue data and analyze them. Material and methods: A systematic revision of the literature about quality indicators in trauma associated to an international consensus conference Results: An internationally approved base core set of 82 trauma quality indicators was obtained: Indicators were divided into 6 fields: prevention, structure, process, outcome, post-traumatic management, and society integrational effects. Conclusion: Present trauma quality indicator core set represents the result of an international effort aiming to provide a useful tool in quality evaluation and improvement. Further improvement may only be possible through international trauma registry development. This will allow for huge international data accrual permitting to evaluate results and compare outcomes.