Crippled Trauma System

Closure of the first teaching hospital trauma center firmly seals the coffin’s lid on an essential health-care service for San Gabriel Valley residents. The decision to close the trauma center at the Huntington Memorial Hospital shows a total lack of appreciation and consideration for important patient-care issues.

In these days of cost controls and corporate medicine financial concerns, who is left to worry about patient care? If physicians and hospitals do not take up this cause, the whole system will collapse. Never should concern for payments be put above patient care.

Huntington Hospital has been an excellent teaching hospital for many years. It chose to be an institution for medical education, rather than just another community hospital. As a teaching hospital, it is expected to instill reliable and trustworthy value systems to its young physicians, yet by choosing to remove itself from the trauma center network, it reinforces the idea that dollars should take precedence over delivery of care. This kind of conduct if allowed to persist threatens the public safety.

Trauma centers are essential health services which lower death rates without question. Allowing the entire San Gabriel Valley to not have a trauma center jeopardizes the health of everyone living there.

A teaching hospital with such high responsibility should have reached a more reasonable and fair solution. Downscaling or accepting less trauma runs would help lower its financial exposure, while at the same time satisfying its societal obligation as a health-care institution. This disastrous and fatal blow must be met with an equally strong counterblow. First, county and state officials need to obtain a restraining order preventing the closure of this essential public service. Failure to achieve this is a real danger to the health of every resident in San Gabriel Valley.

Secondly, if the hospital persists in its trauma closure, then its status as a teaching institution should be removed. We cannot allow institutions of medical education to hold hostage the public’s well-being.

We are all potential patients of trauma centers. Continued closure of these health services only further increase needless deaths due to accidental injuries.

ROBERT A. BELTRAN, M.D.

Temple City