PHTLS: Prehospital Trauma Life Support 10th

PHTLS, Prehospital Trauma Life Support, is the trauma course text EMS (Emergency Medical Services) providers worldwide train from when responding to serious injury, and SkillsTrain is the authorised distributor importing and supplying the 10th Edition into Africa. It is published by Jones and Bartlett in partnership with NAEMT, the National Association of Emergency Medical Technicians, the body that owns and maintains the PHTLS programme internationally.

The course and its text cover the assessment and prehospital management of trauma patients from the moment a crew arrives on scene through to the transport decision, working through scene safety, patient assessment, haemorrhage control, airway and breathing management, and the judgement calls around when to stay and treat versus load and go. The 10th Edition reflects NAEMT's current trauma care guidance, so a programme training from it is working from an internationally recognised, regularly updated standard rather than an older protocol set that may no longer match best practice.

Because trauma remains a leading cause of preventable death in the prehospital phase, services place a premium on having their crews trained to a current, internationally benchmarked standard rather than relying on an outdated or locally improvised approach, which is part of why NAEMT revises the PHTLS curriculum on a regular cycle and why programmes replace older editions as new ones are released.

Who it is for: paramedics, EMTs and advanced EMS providers who respond to trauma incidents and need a course aligned to a recognised international trauma care standard. SkillsTrain supplies this as NAEMT and Jones and Bartlett's published work; we do not write or accredit it.