I think we may be missing the point of this study a bit. Granted, I haven't seen the study protocol but it doesn't appear that they are looking for outcomes in terms of time spent on scene doing interventions. They are trying to determine if patients do better with implementation of invasive treatment in the field vs. providing minimal prehospital care.
There will be an enormous number of confounders here, which I hope they will adjust for in post-hoc analysis (long extrication times, pre-existing co-morbidities, extended transport times, patient age, injury severity, etc.)
Everything we do in the prehospital world has an effect on the patient's physiology. Even something that seems as inconsequential as starting an IV has physiologic sequelae. And certainly insertion of IO or induction and instrumentation of the airway or initiation of positive pressure ventilation can cause perturbations. Those things may prove to be useful in certain patient populations or certain injury severity. And they may prove to be harmful in others. Maybe they are helpful in the field, or maybe they are only helpful if you do them right before putting a scalpel to the abdomen.
I would pose the question that has been posed so many times before- what if the human body is better at maintaining its own homeostatic mechanisms in the case of massive trauma and all these things we do only serve to throw off that homeostatic balance? Even venipuncture alters what the body is doing. Will this study tease that out? Certainly not. But it will give us a broad idea of whether poking patients with things when they are in physiologic extremis and still at some distance from the stabilization of the operating room is helpful or harmful.
I'm certainly not a blind follower of evidence based medicine. As I have stated before, I think it is very difficult to broadly apply evidence to the critically ill population. However, if our ultimate goal is to improve survival, these are questions that must be investigated. And, they must be investigated multiple times, in multiple populations, in multiple places before any real conclusions can be drawn.