Word: trauma
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Airlift. Barr's case was handled with typical military precision. The ambulance driver dispatched to the lake radioed the nearby Carbondale hospital that Barr's neck appeared broken. The "trauma coordinator" there arranged to airlift Barr 300 miles to Chicago's Wesley Memorial Hospital, which has a unit that specializes in spinal injuries. He knew that Southern Illinois University had an ambulance plane and asked them to have it ready in Carbondale, where Barr was heading by ambulance. By the time Barr reached the airfield, a doctor was on hand to confirm the break, and a nurse...
Established by legislative act a year ago, the Illinois Trauma System is the idea of two surgeons: Dr. David Boyd, chief of emergency medical services for the state of Illinois, and Dr. Bruce Flashner, deputy director of the state department of public health. It owes its existence to Governor Richard Ogilvie, who credits quick medical attention for his own survival after a World War II wound. "If you're going to get hurt," Ogilvie told a recent Governors' convention, in an unusual example of boosterism, "do it in Illinois...
...foundation of the system is a network of 37 hospitals or trauma centers, each furnished with on-the-spot trauma coordinators, who serve as field commanders for emergency operations. Under the system, state police and ambulance drivers, armed with ten-point check lists, evaluate the victim's injuries at the scene and describe them to the coordinators by radio; the coordinators in turn pass the information on to doctors who decide where the patient should be sent for care...
...Trauma coordinators control the entire process, plotting the best routes to hospitals for the ambulance drivers; arranging for air transportation when necessary; and in particularly sensitive cases putting those on the scene of the accident into direct contact via radiophone with an expert in the type of injury sustained by the victim. They also maintain a constant phone check on participating hospitals, and know the location of the nearest vacant bed for any type of patient. "We know where every burn bed is in the state of Illinois," says Roy Leslie, trauma coordinator at Cook County Hospital in Chicago...
...million to get things started. Local support proved equally easy to enlist. The state merely set standards for participation in the program (fulltime emergency-room physician, an intensive-care unit, radio communications and a helicopter landing pad); local communities decided which hospitals would be best suited to be trauma centers. Opposition to the plan from local physicians or ambulance operators quickly disappeared. Says Flashner: "It's the type of program that's difficult to be against...