Protestors want U of C to reopen its trauma center
BY KIM JANSSEN Staff Reporter kjanssen@suntimes.com August 15, 2011 6:34PM
Protestors had a press conference to demand University of Chicago Hospital open a level 1 trauma center. 58th Street and Maryland. | Al Podgorski~Chicago Sun-Times
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Updated: October 19, 2011 3:32AM
Chanting “How can you ignore — we’re dying at your door?,” protestors marked the one-year anniversary of a South Side teen’s murder Monday with an emotional appeal for the University of Chicago Medical Center to reopen its trauma center. Damian Turner, 18, was just three blocks from the prestigious hospital when he was shot in a drive-by shooting on August 15 last year. But the South Side has no 24-hour emergency trauma centers for victims of shootings and car crashes, and Turner died after he had to be driven nine miles to Northwestern Memorial Hospital. “He was breathing in the ambulance,” said Turner’s mother, Sheila Rush. “If there was a trauma center at the university, I believe he would have lived.” Rush was one of more than a dozen protestors and friends of Turner who set up tents on the sidewalk outside the university’s medical campus Sunday and camped through the night to demand its trauma center — closed for financial reasons in 1988 — be reopened. The protestors, from a group Turner helped form before his death, Fearless Leading by the Youth, said the university was failing to serve its neighbors in an area where gun violence is all too common. Though Chicago has four trauma centers — equipped and staffed around the clock with specialists to deal with the most severely injured patients — there are none on the South Side south of 15th Street or east of Western Avenue. Trauma victims on the South Side are commonly taken to Christ Hospital in Oak Lawn or downtown to Northwestern. University hospital bosses say it’s part of a broader healthcare shortage on the South Side, which has lost 2,000 hospital beds in recent decades. If it were forced to open an expensive trauma center, the university would have to cut other vital services, they say. Trauma centers in the United States lose $230 million a year treating victims who are uninsured or underinsured, according to he National Trauma Care Foundation. The university says it spent almost $200 million last year on charity care — a claim challenged by protestors. They cited a 2009 report by the Center for Budget and Tax Accountability which found the university received $58 million in non-profit tax-breaks but doled out only $10 million in charitable care. “The university’s not returning the favor when it comes to providing medical care for the community,” said protestor Toussaint Losier, a University of Chicago graduate student. “How are you going to serve the community when one of the leading causes of death of young black men is gunshot wounds, and you can’t treat them?”
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