HYDE PARK — The new head of the University of Chicago Medicine's adult trauma center says two words come to mind after 50 days on the job:
"Helplessness and hopelessness."
Dr. Selwyn O. Rogers Jr. cites the shooting deaths of three children this year — Takiya Holmes, 11; Kanari Gentry Bowers, 12; and Lavontay White Jr. — in an op-ed in the Sun-Times.
"Living in a big city does not need to be a death sentence," says Rogers, who came to Chicago from the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston.
The Harvard-educated surgeon said that violence, while not a disease, can be reduced if it is treated as a public health problem, much like government has attacked heart disease by discovering risk factors like smoking and reducing them.
Risk factors for violence include poverty, unemployment, lack of education and discrimination, he said.
"We need to move the conversation away from the belief that someone 'deserves' to be a victim of intentional violence," wrote Rogers, who also holds a master's degree in public health from Vanderbilt.
When he was introduced as the new head of the trauma center in January, the South Side's only Level 1 adult trauma center, Rogers mentioned an incident in which he had treated a young man for a bullet wound to his neck. A month later, the patient needed treatment for a gunshot wound to his abdomen.
"I felt so devastated because I was like, 'How did I help him?' I didn't feel like I had made any difference," Rogers said in January.
University of Chicago Medicine has treated underage trauma patients for years but had resisted offering costly adult trauma care. That decision angered many in the black community on the South Side as victims of gunshot wounds had to be taken to trauma centers miles away Downtown or to the suburbs.
Trauma care for adults is expected to begin in spring 2018.
