St. Rose trauma center to open Monday

Molly Ball

Thursday, Aug. 18, 2005 | 11:14 a.m.

St. Rose Dominican Hospitals' Siena Campus plans to begin accepting trauma patients on Monday, the hospital said Wednesday.

The nonprofit Henderson hospital at Eastern Avenue and St. Rose Parkway has received its state license to open a Level 3 trauma center, St. Rose spokesman Andy North said.

The opening will be a boon to the fast-growing southern part of the Las Vegas Valley, where victims of car accidents, gunshots and burns previously had to be taken several miles to the existing trauma centers at University Medical Center and Sunrise Hospital. St. Rose will now be able to treat most of those types of injuries.

Paramedics use strict criteria to determine whether to take a patient to the nearest hospital, the hospital of the patient's choice or the nearest trauma center.

"People from here were having to go 45 minutes in heavy traffic for relatively minor problems," said Dr. Sean Dort, medical director of the new trauma program.

The prognosis for victims of trauma worsens significantly if medical care isn't administered within 30 minutes, North noted.

"Henderson is the second biggest city in Nevada, and it doesn't have a trauma center," he said.

St. Rose expects to take 500 trauma patients per year from an area that encompasses Henderson, extending west to Interstate 15 and north to Sunset Road, said Eddie Tajima, administrative assistant for the emergency medical services department of the Clark County Health District.

St. Rose's Level 3 designation means it can treat most traumas with general surgery, but must transfer patients who require a specialist, Dort said. The hospital hopes to upgrade the trauma center to Level 2 within the next few years, he said.

In February, Sunrise opened a Level 2 center, capable of treating serious traumas. UMC is the state's only Level 1 center, equipped with research facilities and a burn unit.

St. Rose's trauma center isn't a new building or ward, just a special bay in the emergency room, built by combining two regular ER bays.

The bay has sliding glass doors, allowing patients to be rushed in and out; plenty of room for multiple doctors to work around one bed; and a wide variety of life-saving equipment at hand.

In addition, all of St. Rose's ER nurses have been trained to deal with trauma.

As opposed to Sunrise and UMC, which have round-the-clock trauma specialists on site, Dort and three other trauma-trained surgeons will be on call at St. Rose. But they will be called to the hospital when a patient is on the way, meaning they will arrive about the same time as the ambulance, Dort said.

Sunrise's trauma center expects to treat about 1,000 patients within the first year of opening its four trauma suites, spokeswoman Glenda McCartney said.

"We welcome St. Rose opening this service because the population is crying out for it," she said.