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U. of C. Trauma Center Still Years Away From Opening, Surgeon-in-Chief Says

By Sam Cholke | December 17, 2015 2:07pm
 The University of Chicago's surgeon-in-chief said it will take years to get a new trauma center open on campus.
The University of Chicago's surgeon-in-chief said it will take years to get a new trauma center open on campus.
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HYDE PARK — A new trauma center in Hyde Park is still years away from opening, University of Chicago officials said Thursday after announcing plans for the center were moving from Holy Cross to campus.

Dr. Jeffrey Matthews, chairman of the department of surgery and surgeon-in-chief, said Thursday that years of planning, recruiting staff and getting approval from the state and other trauma centers would still need to happen before a trauma center opens on the university’s campus.

In the summer, the university started the legwork of figuring out what would be required to open a trauma center and announced a partnership in the fall with Sinai Health Systems to develop a center at Holy Cross Hospital.

Matthews said that when the university got into the nitty-gritty of planning for Holy Cross in September, it discovered the plan wasn’t going to work the way it needed to in order to be successful.

“It just made more sense to do it as a single campus,” Matthews said.

He said the planners found that to really work as it should, the trauma center would need to be much closer to the experts at the university, like the doctors in the university’s Burn and Complex Wound Center.

Matthews was clear that being successful doesn’t mean the new trauma center will make money or fills some unmet need for trauma care in the city. He said the university will almost certainly lose money treating trauma patients, who are expected to be primarily South Siders who have been shot, stabbed or suffered some other penetrating injury.

Matthews said the city currently has enough trauma centers, they’re just in the wrong places.

“That’s always been one of the main conundrums, other trauma centers may lose volume [of patients],” Matthews said.

Before getting approval from the state, the university will need to get the six trauma centers already serving Chicago to sign-off on a plan that would mean they lose patients.

“I think the support for it is very strong,” Matthews said.

He said the the directors of the trauma centers, which include Northwestern Memorial Hospital, Mount Sinai Hospital, Cook County’s John Stroger Hospital and Advocate Christ Medical Center in Oak Lawn that currently treat the bulk of South Side trauma patients, will meet in January to start discussing the plan.

That group is still debating a proposal from last year about raising the age limit to 17 from 15 at the university’s pediatric trauma center at Comer Children’s Hospital.

Matthews said the university is still pursuing raising the age limit at Comer, but the issue will be moot when the adult trauma center opens.

He said the university would be working out a timeline in the coming weeks for the bevy of approvals and sign-offs the university will need.

The university will also need to hire a team of trauma surgeons and fill in gaps in medical expertise at the hospital to support that team, Matthews said.

Perhaps the biggest part of the planning that will determine how long it takes to open the trauma center is figuring out where it will go, according to Matthews.

He said the university has not yet started discussing whether portions of the Bernard A. Mitchell Hospital, 5815 S. Maryland Ave., on the hospital campus, could be retrofitted and the current emergency room expanded or whether an entirely new structure would need to be built.

Matthews said he was not involved in discussions about how much the trauma center, expanded emergency room and added inpatient beds was expected to cost.

The partnership with Holy Cross was expected to cost $40 million.

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