Introduction:

The usage of prognostic tools that allow assessing trauma severity, as well as injury survival and mortality, allows patient stratification and making right decisions for the most effective treatment in the hospital area.

Objective:

To carry out a bibliographic review about the prognostic tools most widely used in emergency care to identify maxillofacial trauma severity.

Methods:

A bibliographic review was carried out from October 2018 to January 2019. We examined books and articles published in high-impact magazines, in Spanish, English and Portuguese, with priority attention on those five years old or less. We consulted the MEDLINE, EBSCO, PubMed, SciELO, Clinical Key databases using the descriptors Trauma Severity Indices, Maxillofacial Injuries, Traumatology, and Indexes. Two books and 50 articles were retrieved, although the review was limited to only 33 which described best the elements studied.

Information analysis and integration:

The Cooter-David scoring system, the maxillofacial injury severity score, the facial injury severity scale, the facial fracture severity scale, and the ZS model are the main instruments used for existing severity forecast in the facial region.

Conclusions:

There literature includes scales, indexes and scoring systems for predicting the maxillofacial trauma severity in the emergency department, each one showing advantages that make them an adjunct tool for trauma care; however, they also have disadvantages that complicate their application in the hospital setting. The facial injury severity scale is among the most widely used tools, as far as it is easy to apply in the emergency services, but with deficiencies for treating soft tissue and bone components. In Cuba, there is little evidence about the use of these instruments in the specialty of maxillofacial surgery.

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