Eryn Rogers/MEDILL

Protesters marched to the University of Chicago Medical Center Wednesday demanding it create a Level I trauma center.

Youth protest calls for trauma center on South Side

BY ERYN ROGERS
SEP 29, 2011

Eryn Rogers/MEDILL

More than 75 people rallied at the new University of Chicago Medical Center hospital pavillion Wednesday afternoon.

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It was just after midnight on a humid August night last year. Cierra Williams was hanging out on a block of her Woodlawn neighborhood celebrating a friend’s birthday. The laughter turned to screams when shots rang out from a car driving by. Williams and her friends ran, but a stray bullet hit her best friend, Damian Turner, in the back.

“After he got shot they took him to U of C and when he got there they turned him around because there’s no trauma center there, so they took him to Northwestern, and by the time he got there he bled out and lost his life,” Williams said.

Chicago youth groups and organizers met Wednesday afternoon at 61st and Cottage Grove, the corner where Turner was gunned down, and marched four blocks to the University of Chicago Medical Center. Wednesday marked what would have been Turner’s 20th birthday.

The group, organized by Fearless Leading by the Youth, protested the lack of a Level I adult trauma center at the hospital, as part of a long-running campaign. . Injured victims on the South Side are transported to the closest trauma centers at Northwestern Memorial Hospital just north of the Loop and John H. Stroger, Jr. Hospital on the city’s West Side, each about 10 miles away. Community members said that’s too far for trauma victims.

Level I trauma centers provide emergency treatment for all kinds of traumatic injuries, such as car crashes and gunshot wounds. Trauma centers are expensive to operate, requiring staffing by specialists 24 hours a day, which is why all hospitals don’t have them.

“They are not doing their service to the community and providing care to the community,” Dan Boris, a Chicago resident and supporter of the cause, said. “They don’t want people…who don’t have insurance specifically to have access to health care,”

Passing cars and pedestrians supported the diverse and growing crowd of more than 75 people with high fives, waves and honks. Alderman Willie Cochran (20th) spoke to the group as it began its march.

“It’s not an issue concerning the poor, or an issue concerning blacks. It’s a socioeconomic issue affecting all of us,” Cochran told the marchers.

Some residents echoed Cochran’s assertion that it is an economic issue.

“University of Chicago has money to build a $40,000 research center, but can’t produce a Level I trauma center in one of the most violent areas of Chicago,” said Marlon English, a friend of Turner’s and a Woodlawn resident.

The University of Chicago Medical Center discontinued their adult trauma center in 1988 to invest resources in other areas. The money goes to maintaining a trauma center for children, a neonatal intensive care unit, and the only burn unit on the South Side, among other services, hospital officials said in a written statement. The hospital said it doesn’t have the staff or funds to re-open an adult trauma center.

Organizers say some of the money used to build the new $700 million hospital pavilion could be allocated to a trauma center.

Darrius Lightfoot, who founded Fearless Leading by the Youth with Turner, said they are fighting this cause “so no best friend, brothers, mothers, cousins, have to go through what so many of these people on the Southside are going through.”