What is your approach to clearing the cervical spine in intubated patients more than 24 hours after their initial injury?

I think the answer to this depends upon the suspicion of injury. This then goes back to what was the incident that caused concern for clearing the cervical spine. Many times, we rely upon the CT scan of the cervical spine, and we look for fractures, dislocations, or soft tissue swelling. If the conc...

At Harborview Medical Center in Seattle, we QA’d our spinal clearance practices about 15 years ago, concerned about the delays in treatment and mobilization due to prolonged lack of cervical spine clearance. At that point, we created an algorithm that allowed clearance with altered LOC if the CT was...