Dr. Bala's clinical and research experience in trauma care started in 2001 while he was a second year surgical resident at the Hadassah Medical Center and was first exposed to trauma surgery. Since then trauma surgery has become a major topic of his investigations and a main subspecialty.
During his period of residency in general surgery at Hadassah Medical Center, he took care of and was involved in the management of hundreds of casualties that arrived at our Trauma Center following terrorist attacks. On the basis of his experiences, he helped to first introduce the civilian protocol for the management of mass casualty incidents MCIs and showed his team's high success rate in saving life by fully utilizing the limited resources available in civilian hospitals. He was able to summarize this experience in a number of recently published papers relating to different aspects of MCI management, for the first time assessed in terms of ICU need and blood use during the MCI (Published in Injury and European Journals). He summarized his data from hundreds of victims suffering from post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) related to terrorist attacks in an article published in the Journal of Trauma.
Collection of this data is an ongoing project, for which he works in close collaboration with a psychological group in his hospital. The importance of these studies has been demonstrated in real-time and he have been invited as an expert speaker and guest lecturer to a number of teaching courses and conferences around the world.
Lastly, he is active in National Homeland Security committee for disaster preparedness, where he works on preparedness for earthquake and chemical disaster on hospital and national levels.
Other topics of special interest:
- Trauma surgery and surgical critical care
- Education in surgery and trauma