Agreed -- at my institution, EMS would call in with whatever they were bringing, and we would either alert the "stabilization team" (made up of ED personnel) or not. If, once we got into the trauma room, the pt did indeed need activation of the trauma surgeons, the pit boss would ask the tech to page them, with whatever urgency code seemed appropriate. Or... not. Often we didn't need to call the surgeons.
However, with a pt who would be getting admitted, it would have to be one surgical unit or another taking care of them. And so we'd call the "trauma team" in the most low-priority way -- just like we'd call any admitting team. For dispos home, we didn't call on other services, unless the pt had a hx with them and we thought the other service would like to know.
So maybe you're hearing a lot of these because your institution's rules demand a consult on every admission OR dispo. In which case, yeah, that sounds annoying.
Where I trained, we had a list of what constituted a Level I (most serious), Level II, and Level III trauma. If any of the criteria were met, a trauma got "levelled". Depending on the level, some combination of surgeon would come down, sometimes prior to the patient arrival, sometimes after.
Level III: 2nd or 3rd year surgery resident and/or emergency med resident rotating on "trauma" team.
Level II: Upper level surgury resident plus any of the above
Level I: Trauma attending (Surgeon) plus any (usually all) of the above personnel.
As for the actual trauma, assuming everyone was there before the trauma arrived, one resident (and we rotated on a daily basis whether it was the ED resident or the trauma team resident) would "run" the trauma. The other residents would be designated as "procedure" residents and would get to, for example, put in lines or chest tubes.
The airway was *always* the responsibility of the EM resident on service in the department.
The actual ordering of tests -- especially beyond the basic trauma protocol -- was a joint effort between the EM resident and attending and the trauma team, the latter after they staffed it with their attending. Ultimately, the trauma team would determine dispo (discharge, admit, to OR, etc.) with the caveat that if the EM folks thought the patient needed more than the trauma team thought (e.g. the trauma team thought d/c, the EM folks were a little more inclined to admit) then the trauma team would usually trust the judgement of the ER folks and admit for 24 obs or something similar.
So to answer your question -- very frequent "trauma" consults but in a very integrated approach.
