HYDE PARK — The University of Chicago broke ground Thursday on what will be the first trauma center on the South Side.
The center will help save lives and will also create 1,000 permanent jobs, helping families move into the middle class, said Mayor Rahm Emanuel. That will help the community at large, he said.
"We're grateful to this university not only for what it does for its students, but what it will do for the entire South Side, both in the health care and in the economic development and the jobs that will come," Emanuel said.
We’re breaking ground today on our new emergency department with adult trauma care! #GetCARE pic.twitter.com/hE5fHPyiOM
— UChicago Medicine (@UChicagoMed) September 15, 2016
Toni Preckwinkle, president of the Cook County Board, thanked activists, who she said "prodded" the university into building the trauma center. Activists protested for years, urging the university to build a center to serve people on the South Side.
A rendering of the University of Chicago's new Emergency Department and trauma center. [Twitter/University of Chicago Medicine]
"They surely raised the issue in the first place and were persistent in championing the issue over time, and I'm very grateful to them for that," Preckwinkle said after helping break ground on the emergency department. "We have just very, very discouraging levels of violence in many communities on the South Side, a lot of blunt force trauma, and as a result this facility will be heavily used, I'm afraid. But I'm grateful for its presence and the service it will provide to victims of violence in our communiteis."
Kyra Wosford, a senior at Crane Medical Preparatory High School, said after the groundbreaking that she knows the trauma center will save lives. Before, South Siders had to travel to the south suburbs, Downtown, West or North Sides when they needed emergency medical care, she said.
A Garfield Park native, Wosford hopes to one day be a nurse practitioner in an emergency department like the one being built at the university.
"It's the first trauma center on the South Side, so it would be a pleasure to work here," Wosford said. "I think that they should have built a trauma center a long time ago, but I'm glad they have one now so more lives can be saved."
Trauma centers care for the most seriously injured patients who need immediate medical attention, like the victims of car accidents or gunshot wounds. The center is less a physical space than a team of specially trained physicians who must be on call 24 hours a day.
Medical center leaders said in February when the plan was being submitted to state regulators for approval that its trauma center and expanded cancer center would require hiring 1,000 people, but it was unclear how many would be dedicated to trauma care.
The trauma center is expected to see 2,700 patients a year and cost $20 million each year to run when it opens in 2018. The trauma center will require a new emergency room equipped with trauma bays and MRI and CAT scan machines and the teams of medical professionals there to make it all work.
The Mitchell Hospital building will be renovated for cancer patients after a new emergency room is built at the University of Chicago. [University of Chicago Medicine Center]
The construction of the new emergency room on the first floor of a parking garage at 5656 S. Maryland Ave. is expected to cost $40 million. That cost is just a fraction of the construction budget for the expanded cancer treatment facility, which medical center officials have said is necessary to offset the high operating costs of the trauma center.
The Mitchell Hospital building, where the emergency room now is located, will get $230 million in renovations to add 180 new hospital beds in the building. That move will clear out much of the 10th floor of the university’s newest hospital building, the Center for Care and Discovery, to make room for new operating rooms for the trauma team next to the intensive care unit.
All of this new construction is expected to be paid for through $200 million in new debt, with the first $40 million in new debt expected to come in 2017.
It was unclear how the credit ratings agencies, which have begun to more seriously question the university’s debt load recently, would react when the plan for the expansion was announced in February. But in May, Fitch Ratings said the medical center’s outlook remained stable, despite carrying $867.5 million in debt as of March, because it continued to have better-than-expected operating margins and brought in $1.5 billion in revenue during the 2015 fiscal year.
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