thumb|250 px|Golden hour principle
In emergency medicine, the golden hour is the period of time immediately after a traumatic injury during which there is the highest likelihood that prompt medical and surgical treatment will prevent death. While initially defined as an hour, the exact time period depends on the nature of the injury and can be more than or less than this duration. The concept of the "Golden Hour" may have been derived from the French military's World War I data. The R Adams Cowley Shock Trauma Center section of the University of Maryland Medical Center's website quotes Cowley as saying, "There is a golden hour between life and death. If you are critically injured you have less than 60 minutes to survive. You might not die right then; it may be three days or two weeks later — but something has happened in your body that is irreparable." Bryan Bledsoe, a physician and outspoken critic of the golden hour and other controversial medical topics, such as critical incident stress management, has said that the peer-reviewed medical literature does not demonstrate any "magical time" for saving critical patients. There are different critical periods for different injuries.
See also
- Air ambulance
- Window of opportunity