After Years of Protest, South Side of Chicago Finally Getting an Adult Trauma Center

[eridani]

http://readersupportednews.org/news-section2/318-66/32350-after-years-of-protest-south-side-of-chicago-finally-getting-an-adult-trauma-center

After years of protests by community activists demanding access to urgent medical care, University of Chicago Medicine and Sinai Health System on Thursday announced a $40 million joint project to open an adult trauma center for the South Side.

The plan would convert the emergency room at Holy Cross Hospital into a Level 1 trauma center — meaning some of the most violence-plagued neighborhoods in the city, including Englewood, Washington Park and Greater Grand Crossing, will be within 5 miles of high-quality care, a crucial distance in saving lives, studies show.

The South Side has been without adult trauma care since the now-defunct Michael Reese Hospital in Bronzeville closed its center in 1991, forcing residents of communities that experience a disproportionate amount of gun violence to travel as far as 10 miles by ambulance to be treated.

The announcement is expected to ease tensions between University of Chicago and members of the South Side community who have tried for more than five years to pressure the university to establish a trauma center on its Hyde Park campus. The protests reached a national audience over the last two years as the university successfully led a bid to bring the Barack Obama Presidential Center to the South Side.

Sinai Health System, which in 2013 acquired Holy Cross, located at 68th Street and California Avenue in Marquette Park, has run a trauma center at Mount Sinai Hospital on the West Side for more than 25 years. It will provide most of the medical personnel, including emergency care physicians, anesthesiologists, nursing staff and trauma care support services.