Douglas F Zatzick
University of Washington, WA·Medicine & Clinical Research
Each year more than 30 million people in the US go to emergency rooms or other acute care settings after an injury, and about 2.5 million are hurt badly enough to be admitted to the hospital. Many of these survivors of car crashes, gun violence, extreme weather and other life-threatening events go on to develop posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), a lasting condition of intrusive memories, anxiety and avoidance, often alongside other problems.
- Fields
Medicine & Clinical Research
Public Health & Epidemiology
Psychology
- Topics
posttraumatic stress disorder
traumatic injury
trauma centers
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Jun 2027
What they work on
- Test whether a brief stepped care intervention, combining care management, medication and psychotherapy, reduces PTSD symptoms over 12 months compared with required screening and referral, in a randomized trial of 424 hospitalized injury survivors.
- Test whether the stepped care intervention reduces later emergency department and inpatient visits, using population-level data automatically captured through an emergency department health information exchange.
- Explore mediators and moderators, the factors that explain or change how well the intervention works, to identify practical quality improvements for national trauma center care.
- Survey all US level I and II trauma centers about PTSD screening, intervention and referral, and use a rapid ethnographic implementation assessment and a policy summit to bring results into College of Surgeons standards.
More about the research
The central question here is how trauma centers, the hospitals that treat the most seriously injured, can reliably screen for these mental health problems and treat them as part of routine care.
Why it matters
Injury survivors treated at US trauma centers, including victims of firearm violence and extreme weather events, often leave the hospital with untreated PTSD and related conditions. A brief stepped care program that works in routine practice could reduce their symptoms and repeat emergency visits. Because the results are designed to feed directly into American College of Surgeons trauma center standards, they could shape mental health care at trauma centers nationwide.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Tatiana Davidson
Medical University of South Carolina, SC·Psychology
Test whether the Trauma Resilience and Recovery Program, a stepped-care model with text-message symptom tracking, improves quality of life and emotional recovery in 300 injured adolescents aged 12–17.
Lauren Magee
Indiana University-Purdue University-Indianapolis, IN·Public Health & Epidemiology
Build trauma networks of everyone present at a shooting (victims and witnesses in police records) plus family members of firearm injury victims identified through Medicaid, using individually linked healthcare and police records from 2016–2022.
Norah C Feeny
Case Western Reserve University, OH·Psychology
Test in an open trial of 45 people whether PATH, a six-session therapy, reduces unproductive event processing, avoidance and reward-processing deficits in people with persistent symptoms after a destabilizing life event.
The school
University of Washington: 81 labs on PI Pages, $1.7B a year on research, 694 research doctorates a year.
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