Date: November 8, 2025 Reference: Millin M, et al., Prehospital Trauma Compendium: Prehospital Management of Spinal Cord Injuries – A NAEMSP Comprehensive Review and Analysis of the Literature, Prehospital Emergency Care, Aug 2025. Guest Skeptic: Clay Odell, BSN, NRP, RN, is a Paramedic Firefighter with Newport (NH) Fire-EMS. He is a past Chief of the NH Bureau of Emergency Medical Services. Previous positions he held are Trauma System Coordinator for the State of NH, Executive Director of Upper Valley Ambulance in Fairlee VT, and a flight crew member at Dartmouth Hitchcock Advanced Response Team. Clay has been a paramedic since 1985 and has been a registered nurse since 1997. Case: Your EMS unit responds to a 911 call for a hunting accident. You arrive to find the patient sitting on the tailgate of his truck. He tells you he fell out of his deer stand, approximately 20 feet, landing on his head. He walked out of the woods about a mile after the fall. His chief complaint is head and neck pain. He has a Glasgow Coma Scale (GCS) score of 15, a hematoma and laceration above his left eye, and he is quite tender over the cervical spine region. You observe your colleagues trying to apply a rigid cervical collar without moving the patient’s neck. It goes about as well as usual, meaning the patient's head is moved a bit. Maybe more than a bit. He then decides he hates the collar and rips it off. He adamantly refuses all attempts to apply a soft collar or improvised towel roll. On arrival at the trauma center, you give a handoff report, and the team leader demands to know why the patient is not in a collar. The patient overhears this and rather profanely informs everyone, "you ain't putting no *F-ing* collar on me". Background: Prehospital care for suspected SCI has two competing imperatives, limiting secondary cord injury while avoiding iatrogenic harm. Historically, EMS prioritized rigid immobilization (long backboard + rigid cervical collar) based on the fear that post-injury movement could precipitate delayed neurologic deterioration. In the last two decades, emergency care has shifted toward selective spinal motion restriction (SMR) and earlier collar removal when appropriate. This reflects a better understanding of risk, test performance, and harms from prolonged immobilization. In the ED, validated decision tools (NEXUS and Canadian C‑spine Rule) help identify very‑low-risk patients who do not need imaging; when imaging is needed, modern multidetector CT outperforms plain radiography for clinically significant cervical spine injury (CSI). A large Western Trauma Association cohort (10,276 patients) found CT sensitivity of 98.5% with a negative predictive value of ~100% for clinically significant injuries. The misses were rare and occurred in patients with focal neurologic deficits, who then warranted an MRI [1]. Prehospital protocols increasingly emphasize minimizing time on a backboard and avoiding prolonged collar use because of pressure injury and other morbidities. A systematic review by the East Association for the Surgery of Trauma (EAST) supports collar removal after a negative high-quality CT in an obtunded adult. They highlight the downstream harm from extended immobilization without added benefit [2]. Pediatrics and geriatrics remain special populations. NEXUS shows high sensitivity in children, though confidence intervals are wider in the very young. Clinicians should have a low threshold for imaging in older adults, who are vulnerable to serious cervical spine injuries from low-energy mechanisms [3]. Clinical Question: In trauma patients with potential SCI, what is the evidence that post‑injury movement causes delayed neurologic deterioration, and what are the benefits and harms of prehospital spinal immobilization and SMR? Reference: Millin M, et al., Prehospital Trauma Compendium: Prehospital Management of Spinal Cord Injuries – A NAEMSP Comprehensive Review and Analysis of the Literature, Prehospital Emergen
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