UChicago's Much-Anticipated Trauma Center Is Opening Next Year

By Rachel Cromidas in News on Jun 7, 2017 10:13PM

Rendering of the adult trauma center.

University of Chicago Medicine is planning to open the new adult trauma center a few months after opening a bigger emergency room in January of next year, plus an expansion of its facilities to include more inpatient beds and a cancer institute, all as part of a $270 million campus expansion.

The university announced plans for the trauma center in 2015, after years of pushback from community activists who insisted it was the medical center's duty to offer an adult trauma center in its South Side community, which neighbors some of the Chicago neighborhoods most plagued by gun violence. Trauma surgeon Dr. Selwyn Rogers Jr. will be the center's director. According to Crain's, he has been working to recruit six new trauma surgeons for the center.

The University had long resisted building a trauma center on the campus, but reversed course a little over a year ago under pressure from many who believed the location would be key in helping adult victims of gun violence and other traumas, who would otherwise have to travel many more miles to seek emergency care.

At the time, the medical center released a statement saying that "UChicago has concluded that integrating an adult Level 1 trauma center with its Level 1 pediatric trauma program, and Burn and Complex Wound Center, would be of great benefit to South Side patients."

"At the end of the day," the statement continued, "we realized that integrating all of these services on one site, on our campus, made the most sense for South Side patients."