HYDE PARK — The University of Chicago submitted a proposal to the state Thursday calling for $269 million in changes to the hospital to open a new trauma center.
The university is asking the state to approve a plan called "Get CARE," which would involve building a new emergency room, combining the Comer Children’s Hospital’s existing trauma center with the new one and converting the Mitchell Hospital building into a center for cancer patients.
“Get CARE is a plan to reduce the disparities that exist in access to critical care on the South Side and address the severe capacity constraints our medical center faces,” said Sharon O’Keefe, president of University of Chicago Medicine. “For 310 days last year, our hospital was so full that we were forced to turn some patients away, while others endured longer-than-acceptable wait times.
“We must address these capacity constraints to provide the care our community and patients need,” she said.
The university is also asking for approval for 188 new hospital beds, which would make the university bigger than Rush University Center's 731 beds and closer to Northwestern Medicine's 894 beds.
The changes are expected to create 400 construction jobs and 1,000 permanent jobs, including a team of trauma care specialists on call 24 hours, who will need operating rooms available to them at a moment’s notice to treat the most severely injured patients, like victims of gunshot wounds or car accidents.
Few details of the plan were available Thursday morning, as the Illinois Department of Public Health and the university had not released the full proposal. The university has been working on a plan since announcing in December that it would establish a new trauma center at its Hyde Park campus rather than at Holy Cross Hospital on the Southwest Side.
Earlier this month, the university said it also was planning to add hospital beds and to build a new emergency room on the first floor of a parking garage at 5656 S. Maryland Ave.
Previously, the university planned to convert the Mitchell Hospital building into offices, but will now renovate it to house and treat cancer patients.
It’s unclear whether other services needed by the trauma specialists would also be in the building, across the street in the Center for Care and Discovery or elsewhere in the medical center.
The state will send the proposal to a committee of leaders from the city’s four other trauma centers and others that serve the city, like Advocate Christ Medical Center in southwest suburban Oak Lawn, which treats many of the trauma patients that are expected to go to the university once its trauma center opens.
University officials said in December they expected the other trauma centers to welcome the university.
More details about the plan are expected in the coming days as the state releases the full proposal from the university.
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