When it comes to emergency medical situations, life and death can rely on a matter of minutes.
Lauri Sansing, director of emergency services at Baptist Memorial Hospital-Golden Triangle, drove that point home Thursday as she spoke at the Columbus Exchange Club at Lion Hills Center.
Trauma is the fourth leading cause of death in the U.S., claiming 170,000 lives each year.
“Half of those deaths are people ages 15 to 45 and males are two times more likely to die from trauma incidents than females,” Sansing said. “And while the elderly are less likely to suffer trauma, those that do are more likely to die than those in other age groups.”
Sansing, who earned her nursing degree from Mississippi University for Women in 1998 and has been with Baptist ever since graduation, said there were 11,473 ambulance calls at Baptist in 2016.
“Of that number, 611 were trauma patients,” she said. “Sixty-nine of those were Alpha alerts, which is defined as severe injuries – penetrating wounds such as stab wounds or gunshot wounds or injuries with more than two broken bones.”
Those calls require quick action, and Alpha alerts require an on-call surgeon be available within a half-hour.
Having a surgeon available as quickly as possible is not the only area where the emergency services in mindful of minutes, however.
“What we are working on now is our turn-around time,” Sansing said. “Our goal is 240 minutes. That means the time between when the patient arrives until the patient is in a hospital room. We’ve had some success there. We’ve got it down to 211 minutes, so we’re definitely moving in the right direction.”
Sansing said efforts to save those precious minutes come at a time when hospitals throughout the state are suffering from budget cuts caused last year when the Mississippi Legislature approved a measure sweeping some state agency funds into the general fund. That measure had some unintended consequences, she said.
“As a result of that, hospitals in our district, the Northern District, lost an average of 1.65 percent of its budget for emergency services,” Sansing said.
Sansing said Baptist has decided not to allow those cuts to diminish their efforts in emergency services.
“We’re not cutting back in that area, but it does mean we have to make up for those cuts in other areas of our operations,” she said. “The bottom line is we need that money back in our budgets. We’re lobbying the Legislature now, and we hope to have that measure killed or amended. I urge everybody to call their legislators and tell them how important than money is. It literally saves lives.”
Slim Smith is a columnist and feature writer for The Dispatch. His email address is [email protected].
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