AS WE SEE IT

Trauma centers need funds from budget to survive

Thursday, March 1, 2007

Johnson City Press

Paging Tennessee’s lawmakers: Trauma centers across the state are in need of immediate care. The state General Assembly is being asked to revise an anemic funding formula that has left the state’s trauma care system in critical condition. As Press staff writer Teresa Hicks reported Monday, members of the Trauma Care Advisory Council are lobbying in Nashville to convince state leaders that trauma centers in Tennessee deserve a slice of the budgetary pie.

The council wasn’t successful last year in convincing state lawmakers to include trauma centers in the state budget, but Dr. Julie Dunn, director of trauma services at Johnson City Medical Center and chairwoman of the Tennessee Committee on Trauma and the Trauma Care Advisory Council, believes this year will be different.

JCMC and Holston Valley Medical Center are among just six Level 1 trauma centers in Tennessee. Poor funding for trauma centers has forced many such facilities to close the doors. In the last 18 months alone, 32 trauma centers in the United States have shut down.

Tennessee has lost more than half of its trauma centers in the past 10 years. A leading cause of those closures has been a lack of funding from the state. Tennessee officials have not allocated a single dime to the operation of these critical care units since their creation in 1988.

This is a troubling trend since trauma is the No. 1 cause of death of people between the ages of 1 and 45. Officials say disabilities and longerterm care as a result of trauma impacts millions of people per year, and costs this nation more than $100 billion annually.

It costs about $14 million a year just to keep a Level 1 trauma center in existence. As rates of uninsured patients rise in Tennessee, there are fewer dollars coming in from insurance companies to cover those costs. This has put many trauma centers in a state of financial emergency.

That’s why Dunn’s group and officials with the Tennessee Hospital Association have joined with other health care organizations across the state to ask the state General Assembly to lend a funding hand to their trauma centers. These funds would help cover costs incurred from the uninsured patients who suffer injuries that lead to catastrophic trauma-related hospital costs.

Keeping the doors open to these trauma centers should be a priority of lawmakers and must take precedent over budget “pork” requests. It is a matter of public health.