A randomised controlled trial of verbal guidance versus verbal guidance supplemented by a photographic aid for bystander identification of intramuscular tranexamic acid injection sites in a simulated road injury scenario
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: Non-compressible haemorrhage is a leading cause of preventable death following road injury. Tranexamic acid (TXA), when administered early, improves survival. Intramuscular (IM) administration offers a feasible route for early administration by lay bystanders. However, the ability of bystanders to correctly identify safe IM injection sites remains unclear. This study aimed to evaluate whether verbal guidance supplemented by a photographic aid improves the accuracy of site identification in a simulated road injury scenario. METHODS: In this randomised controlled trial, 64 lay participants were recruited on a university campus and randomised to receive either (1) verbal guidance alone or (2) verbal guidance plus photographic aid to locate the deltoid injection site on a simulated injured person. Site identification was assessed via sticker placement, and three expert raters with diverse medical backgrounds independently reviewed standardised photographs to determine site safety using a majority agreement rule. The primary outcome was safe site identification. A binomial generalised linear model assessed the association between intervention group and correct site identification. Inter-rater reliability was measured using Fleiss' Kappa. RESULTS: Participants in the verbal guidance plus photographic aid group were significantly more likely to identify a safe injection site compared to those receiving verbal guidance alone (87.5% vs. 62.5%; OR 4.67, 95% CI 1.33, 19.92, p = 0.03). The presence of concerns regarding site safety was also significantly lower in the photo and verbal group (18.8% vs. 53.1%, p = 0.002). No significant associations were found between accuracy and participant age, gender, prior training, or confidence. CONCLUSIONS: Supplementing verbal guidance with a photographic aid significantly improves bystander accuracy in identifying safe IM TXA injection sites in a simulated setting. This finding supports the potential integration of visual aids into emergency dispatch protocols to enhance early haemorrhage control in trauma care. Further research is needed to assess real-world application and impact. CLINICAL TRIAL NUMBER: ISRCTN Registry: ISRCTN41280918. TRIAL REGISTRATION: ISRCTN Registry: ISRCTN41280918, 08/08/2025 Retrospectively registered.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".