University Of Chicago Medicine Opens New Trauma Center

CHICAGO (CBS) — The University of Chicago has opened its new Level 1 adult trauma center, the first such emergency department on the South Side in nearly 30 years.

University of Chicago Medicine said its new emergency department at 56th and Maryland is the most advanced of its kind in Chicago, replacing the old emergency room inside the Mitchell Hospital building at 58th and Maryland. The old Mitchell Hospital building was turned into a cancer care facility.

The trauma center designation indicates the hospital has the resources and staffing necessary to provide comprehensive medical care for patients suffering major injuries from traffic crashes, shootings, burns, falls, and more.

Dr. Selwyn Rogers Jr., founding director of the University of Chicago Medicine Trauma Center, said the time is right to open the most advanced trauma center in the region.

“This time in the history of our country, and specifically here in the city of Chicago, there’s not a compelling place that you can have greater impact than on the South Side,” he said.

While the University of Chicago has had a Level 1 pediatric trauma center at Comer Children’s Hospital for years; it hasn’t had a Level 1 adult trauma center since 1988, the South Side has not had one since 1991, when Michael Reese Hospital halted trauma care.

Since then, the only Chicago area hospital with a Level 1 adult trauma center south of 15th Street has been Advocate Christ Medical Center in Oak Lawn.

Without an adult trauma center on the South Side, victims of major trauma often have been forced to travel up to 10 miles via ambulance to Christ, Northwestern Memorial Hospital, or other trauma centers in the Illinois Medical District along the Eisenhower Expressway to receive the advanced medical care they need.

Activists on the South Side for years demanded the University of Chicago add an adult trauma center to its Hyde Park hospital campus.

They said the lack of an adult trauma center on the predominantly black South Side amounted to institutional racism, accusing the hospital of putting profit before lives.

In September 2015, the university announced plans to team up with Sinai Health Systems to open a trauma center at Holy Cross Hospital in the Chicago Lawn neighborhood, but that was not enough for many critics who said that plan would have left some parts of the South Side more than five miles from a trauma center.

In December 2015, the university scrapped that plan, and announced it would add a trauma center to its Hyde Park campus as part of a larger expansion of the hospital.

Rogers said the new trauma center was built with the community in mind.

“I’m going deep into the community, into the barbershops, into our churches; to try to understand the perspectives of the community, and how we could partner with them to advance our mission,” he said.

from CBS Chicago https://ift.tt/2FviEsv