Trauma Center Designations Spark Debate in County
The plan Ventura County Emergency Medical Services (VCEMS) recommends that would designate Los Robles Hospital and Medical Center in Thousand Oaks as the county’s eastern trauma center and Ventura County Medical Center as its western trauma center will go up for a vote tomorrow, but it might well encounter opposition.
The Ventura County Board of Supervisors will vote on the proposed designation of Los Robles as a trauma center Tuesday, but it’s the west side of the county where the confusion comes in because Oxnard’s St. John’s Regional Medical Center contends it is a better choice than VCMC. The same board will also eventually determine that portion of the process—which has already seen appeals to the administrative panel and may well end up as a judicial matter in the court system.
VCEMS’s plan would not, however, divert all ambulance calls to one of two designated trauma centers in the county; rather, emergency personnel would transport people with relatively common and easy-to-treat maladies and injuries to the hospital nearest their location.
However, emergency personnel would automatically transport people with more serious and life-threatening injuries to the nearest designated trauma center. Research shows that would happen six times a day on average for patients who need immediate surgery or suffer head and spinal cord injuries, multiple fractures, severe burns, gunshot wounds, etc., in the county. According to a survey of ambulance calls from 2006, about one-tenth of all transports in Ventura County would require trauma center care under the proposed guidelines.
For more on this story, visit the Ventura County Star here.
