About

In late January 2013, a group of Chicago community members gathered outside the University of Chicago’s new medical center to protest the university’s ineffective response to community needs. In light of the new $700 million Center for Care and Discovery--a building dedicated to further developing the university’s renowned specialty care departments, especially in terms of neuroscience, cancer, advanced surgery, and so on--the community protested the fact that the university continued to lack an adult trauma center. During this protest, various community members (including University of Chicago students) were arrested. Due to this and other compounding  factors, the controversy surrounding the perceived need for an adult trauma center in the Hyde Park area went viral.

A group of honors Science and Society students at Loyola University Chicago decided to center their semester research project on this very issue. We intend to apply skills and concepts learned in our course on graph theory and networking to analyze various aspects of adult trauma centers to access the validity of the concerns in the case of the University of Chicago trauma center.

We attempted to address the following questions in our research:

1. What is the Chicago adult trauma network and why did the University of Chicago Medical Center decide to opt out?
2. What aspects of a trauma center drains a hospital of resources? Can this be evaluated so as to help build a program to effectively stem this drain?
3. What other comparable hospital(s) (e.g. comparable in urban environment, size, neighborhood) in the nation has a trauma center with which we can compare to the University of Chicago's hospital in terms of finances?
4. The closing of one trauma center creates a ‘domino effect’ on the resources of other hospitals. Can this trend be mapped out? Can the relationship between hospitals in the Chicago adult trauma network be mapped out in terms of levels of care, frequency of inter-patient transfers, etc.? Would the establishment of a University Chicago trauma center (in whatever capacity that acceptably would be) change this network?
5. What exactly is the nature of the relationship between the University of Chicago and Northwestern’s medical center in the context of serving their respective communities? What are the roles of these hospitals in treating victims of gun violence, a leading cause of death for African American males ages 15-24.

Group Members:

Jumana Al-Qawasmi
Megan Kraft
Eddie Mejia

Maggie Kelly