Injured troops survival rate higher

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The Surgeon General, Lieutenant General Louis Lillywhite, said all injured troops who could be medically saved were now probably surviving.

The new priority for the Armed Forces was to ensure that the "quality of survival" for those who were saved was as good as possible, he said.

His comments followed a detailed analysis in the Journal of the Royal Army Medical Corps of the 76 deaths from trauma-related injuries which occurred in Iraq and Afghanistan in the 12 months to April 2007.

It found that none of those who died could reasonably have been expected to survive given the severity of their injuries or the battlefield conditions when they were wounded.

The journal said that "in a number of respects" the treatment of battlefield casualties was now superior to the treatment by the NHS of civilian trauma injuries in the UK.

"The main message that the journal delivers is that more injured are surviving their injuries than expected, that our quality of care for the injured exceeds that which is usually found in the United Kingdom, and that almost all deaths that occurred were unavoidable," he said.

He said that statistical evidence from Britain and the US suggested that the death rate from serious injuries was now between 12 to 15% - roughly half the rate which occurred in the Falklands or Vietnam.

"That is where the data is leading us at the moment," he said. "All the evidence is showing that we are not going to be able to cause any more people to survive than currently survive."

Gen Lillywhite said that the improvement in survival rates had coincided with the introduction of new techniques - many of which had been brought in during the course of the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan.