On board for trauma care
9/14/2010 The Brunswick News
Dr. Harold Kent, a surgeon with his practice Georgia Coast Surgical in Brunswick, was recently elected president of the Georgia Society of American College of Surgeons, a group backing the amendment.
"It's about saving lives," Kent said.
In some parts of the state, especially southern Georgia, residents are dangerously far from a trauma center, he said.
Someone with a severe injury has about an hour, according to research, to get to a trauma center to increase the chance of survival by as much as 25 percent, Kent said. "That golden hour is very important."
Most of Georgia's 16 trauma centers, however, are in the northern part of the state, and only four of them provide Level 1 care, the most comprehensive care, offering 24-hour trauma care with a full spectrum of services, from prevention through rehabilitation.
The Brunswick hospital of Southeast Georgia Health System does not have a trauma center. The nearest Level 1 trauma centers are in Savannah and Jacksonville.
Kent said the state needs about 30 trauma centers to meet the needs of the state.
The lack of trauma centers, especially in southern parts of the state, may be a reason that the death rate from trauma in Georgia is 20 percent higher than the national average.
Trauma injuries, a serious injury or shock from an accident or violence, kill more people between the ages of 1 and 44 than any disease or illness, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Unlike a hospital emergency room, a trauma center has a medical staff trained in urgent trauma care, along with the latest technology and life-saving equipment to care for severely injured patients.
The proposed $10 increase in the vehicle tag fee would raise about $80 million a year for a trauma care system in Georgia.
"I look at it like an insurance premium," said Dr. Gage Ochsner, chief of trauma services and surgical critical care at Memorial University Medical Center in Savannah.
"For the price of two Happy Meals, you can have access to life-saving treatment," he said.
Ochsner, who served his residency with Kent in the early 1980s at the Naval Hospital in San Diego, said a statewide system would save the lives of 600 to 700 Georgians and prevent permanent disability in as many as 2,000 a year.
Money from the fee would pay for development of a procedure and a call center for routing patients to the nearest available care center, as well encouraging hospitals in deficient areas of the state to create centers by helping with costs.
Providing trauma care, with its staffing, equipment and training, can be expensive for hospitals, Ochsner said.
For example, a Level 1 trauma center requires an operating room dedicated solely to trauma cases, but restricting use of an operating room at a hospital where surgeries are a major source of revenue could be cost-prohibitive.
Also, hospitals face the possibility of increased indigent care costs.
"With trauma patients, they're not really in a state to ask if they have insurance or not. You have to just take care of them," Ochsner said.
Funding from a vehicle tag fee, however, would help with the cost and might be incentive enough to encourage hospitals to provide the service, Ochsner said.
"Over time, the fee (and trauma care system) pays for itself, because you have people who otherwise would have died, surviving and able to pay taxes and contribute to society," Ochsner said.
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