Before Intermountain Healthcare opened Intermountain Medical Center in Murray, LDS Hospital in Salt Lake City’s Avenues neighborhoods was Intermountain’s flagship trauma center. Now LDS Hospital is a community hospital with plans to expand their trauma capabilities.
“We'll be working towards a Level IV trauma designation,” said Dr. Erica Colvin, emergency medicine specialist for Intermountain Healthcare.
She said the designation is like a checklist insuring the hospital staff are prepared to handle traumatic injuries.
“That just allows us to have our staff or nurses, the other services within the hospital that are able to care for our trauma patients, which we already receive at this time.”
In Utah there are hospitals with Level I through IV trauma designations. Level I is the most comprehensive.
“That means that when we have badly injured patients, we have a whole team of neurosurgeons, orthopedic surgeons and trauma surgeons that are able to respond,” said Colvin.
Utah has three Level I trauma centers – Intermountain Medical Center, Intermountain Primary Children’s Hospital and University of Utah Hospital.
Level II centers have surgeons available 24-7, but not every specialty every hour. Intermountain runs three level two centers – McKay Dee Hospital in Ogden, Utah Valley Hospital in Provo, and St. George Regional Hospital in Southern Utah.
Level III centers have emergency doctors on hand at all times, with surgeons on standby. Intermountain’s Logan Regional Hospital is Level III, along with Davis Hospital and Jordan Valley Medical Center run by Steward and Mountainstar’s Lakeview Hospital.
Level IV hospitals are spread around the state from smaller cities like Moab, to suburban centers like Alta View. LDS Hospital plans to join them.
It’s a long process, including analyzing a year of data about their patients.
“Based on the population we see at LDS hospital, we actually change our trauma criteria. Because we have different trauma patients than they have at Riverton...where you may see more patients that are coming in with animal injuries - like they’ve fallen off a horse. At LDS hospital, we see a lot of patients that have fallen, that sustained ground level falls or are coming down the bobsled and have bike injuries,” said Colvin.
Benefits of qualifying as a trauma center is training to better triage patients, meaning the staff can quickly evaluate patients and sometimes decide they need to transport them to a higher level trauma center.
