SCH looking to expand trauma services

Stephens County Hospital is looking to expand its services to meet the needs of the region.

According to Stephens County Hospital Chief Executive Officer Van Loskoski, they recently hired a third trauma surgeon and are looking to grow its trauma services.

He says they will start small but will eventually grow to handle a larger scope of trauma services for the region.

“We did just finish the hiring of our third trauma surgeon yesterday. This will be a surgeon that does general surgery, endoscopies, he’ll work in our wound care clinic as well, but also is trained in acute care trauma and that’s something that we really think will benefit our entire region, because you have to drive a pretty long distance to get to the nearest trauma center. We’ll start small and progress towards being able to handle a larger and larger scope of trauma in the coming months and years,” he said.

He says some trauma cases don’t require a trauma surgeon; however, the additions they’ve made with the hospital’s team of surgeons will allow them to handle those cases that do require a more invasive treatment.

“A lot of trauma does come to our hospital and doesn’t necessarily require a trauma surgeon. Trauma surgery and trauma are two slightly different things. You might think of a trauma as a broken arm or leg and that might be handled by our orthopedic surgeons here. There might be trauma that results in a laceration or a head injury that really our ER physicians are capable of handling. But then there’s surgery that might result in anterior bleeding or something like that that requires invasive treatment and that’s something that we’ll be progressing towards with the new additions here to our surgery team,” he said.

He says the addition of a trauma surgeon will also fill some gaps in the hospital’s general surgery services.

“You know, trauma is going to go hand-and-hand for us with general surgery, so a lot of the general surgery that had been provided by Dr. Stephen Pinkerton for 35 years here in the county, we’ll be able to handle that again with the addition of the surgeon that we hired yesterday. That’s something that’s not just trauma-based, but also general surgery—things you might think of that are a little bit of a lower scale and more of your elective procedures as well,” he said.

For additional information regarding the services Stephens County Hospital provides visit stephenscountyhospital.com.