No trauma centers exist on Chicago’s southside, where the vast majority of traumatic injuries occur.
The national discussion of whether #blacklivesmatter or which lives matter comes into sharp focus when you consider the lack of trauma centers on Chicago’s southside. That’s where the vast majority of gun violence occurs and where a trauma center is most needed. Chicagoans and community-based groups want a Level 1 Trauma Center there, and with President Obama nearly set to announce where his presidential library will be, it’s no surprise that activists are tying the library to the trauma center. Obviously, based on his biography, housing it at the University of Chicago makes sense. Anywhere else would be a stretch.
You don’t have to run a needs assessment to explore need for a trauma center. A casual glance at one of the two major Chicago papers illustrates the need well. Gunshot and stab wounds are maiming and murdering residents on the southside. Homicide Watch Chicago, a Chicago Sun Times publication counts them every day, with the byline “Mark Every Death. Remember Every Victim. Follow Every Case.” The Chicago Tribune also takes note, counting 432 homicides in 2014 and in 2015, 48, at the time that this post went up.
A Trauma Center Desert
Ask any trauma center expert. They will tell you that Trauma Centers strive to treat patients during the critical first “golden hour” after an accident occurs. Penetrating injuries need rapid attention. As few as ten minutes can make a difference between life and death. That’s when you can maximize health outcomes – perhaps preventing a death or disability. A Level 1 Trauma Center has specially trained and board-certified trauma surgeons, nurses, technologists specially trained to respond to traumatic injuries.
No trauma center exists on the city’s southside. The closest trauma center is Northwestern Memorial Hospital on Chicago’s Gold Coast (where some of Chicago’s richest residents shop and live) and the second closest is at Advocate Christ Medical Center in Oak Lawn, a suburb southwest of the city.
WBEZ clocks travel times within Chicago. A recent report found athat travel times to the closest trauma center exceed recommended standards of 20 minutes for the city. To reach a trauma center from South Shore, 76% of travel times were above 20 minute; 24% were above 30 minutes.
In Obama’s keynote address at the Democratic National Convention in 2004, he asked: “Do we participate in a politics of cynicism or a politics of hope?” It’s a question worth resurrecting now, when residents of the southside of Chicago feel like they not only live in a “trauma desert,” as the experts call it, but that public officials have also deserted them. Will President Obama desert the southside of Chicago?
From a moral and ethical standpoint, a state-of-the-art trauma center on Chicago’s southside needs to be built as soon as possible.
Austerity, Poverty, and Violence
It’s no secret that residents on the southside of Chicago feel disenfranchised. Poverty, austerity budgets, and gang violence leave people with little hope. Some extremely promising community organizing has been ongoing related to the Trauma Center launched by the group Southside Together Organizing for Power (STOP) and their affiliate Fearless Leading of the Youth (FLY), the Kenwood Oakland Community Organization, and several churches. If the names scare some of you, think of the powerlessness that those involved are trying to overcome.
The movie The Interrupters also does an excellent job at showing community-based efforts to thwart senseless gang violence. Surely, prevention can go some ways to improving the public’s health. But it is not enough. The coalition of groups working for the trauma center view violence prevention as complex, driven by despair, unemployment, lack of services, mass incarceration, and austerity in critically needed services, such as mental health clinics, affordable housing, and public schools.
Thus far, U Chicago Medicine has agreed that a regional solution to the trauma desert must be worked out, but publicly, it claims that it does not want to host the trauma center because of the pressure it would place on staff and financial resources.
U Chicago Medicine must be challenged. It would be simple to say that building a Trauma Center on the southside would ratchet up its debt. But in 2011, U Chicago Medicine reported $1.33 billion patient services revenue that does not include endowments, subsidies, and property tax exemptions for being a non-profit hospital. There is sufficient parkland available on the southside for a Level 1 Trauma Center at the University of Chicago along with a Presidential Library that would make the community and President proud.
Meanwhile, as this story unfolds, in the backdrop, healthcare is changing across the nation. New buildings on campuses are supporting bioscience research. Hospital beds will continue to diminish as more care is provided in an ambulatory care setting. U Chicago Medicine has a sparkling new building in Hyde Park, where it has always been. Like other academic medical centers across the United States, off campus, U Chicago Medicine has been creative in targeting programs and outreach to communities that are affluent. You don’t see them looking for patients in the Chicago Defender. New outpatient care centers are proliferating in wealthier parts of town — in many cases leaving an oversupply of doctors there. Advertisements in high-end print media and television commercials target the well insured.
Tying the trauma center to the Presidential Library at the University of Chicago would be a critical step in the right direction. No other Chicago medical entity has the resources at its hand to make this happen. President Obama and the University of Chicago need to step up to the task.
Disclosure: I lived in Chicago for many years. It strikes me far more as a “tale of two cities” than New York City, where I live today.
It seems surprising that the plans for President Obama’s library don’t include a public service component. Such a major project is an opportunity to leverage other development and needn’t be a stand alone jewel, isolated from it’s context. In this case the context is a needy community and a president who finally accomplished what Democrats had been trying to achieve since 1948, taking the first steps toward establishing health care as a human right. What could be more appropriate then linking his library to community health care needs?