Harvard Trauma Surgeon Jim Hurst, MD, Hired to Direct USF HEALTH/HCA Trauma Network

TAMPA—When Jim Hurst, MD, was a second-year resident at the Naval Regional Medical Center in San Diego during the early 1970s, he rotated onto the trauma service under the leadership of a young, dynamic trauma attending who had recently returned from his second tour of duty in Vietnam.

The mentorship experience during a war in which 58,000 were killed prompted Hurst to pursue a career in trauma. Since then, Hurst had become disheartened seeing the ill effects resulting from the declining emphasis on trauma care nationwide. Still, he was surprised to learn that only 38 percent of Floridians who are injured are discharged from a state designated trauma center.

So when Stephen Klasko, MD, dean of the USF College of Medicine and CEO of USF Health, called Hurst with the opportunity to serve as the new chief trauma medical director of the USF Health/HCA Trauma Network, he said yes. The Harvard professor who had won a Faculty Prize for Teaching Excellence in 2007 and also served as chief of surgery at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center packed his bags after a brutal winter that shed 94 inches of snow in Boston, Mass., and arrived in sunny Tampa in early spring.

“It was exciting to learn about USF’s commitment, and the partnership with HCA, to develop this common network,” said Hurst, who lived in Tampa from 1991 to 1995 while working in Tampa General Hospital’s regional trauma center and served on the USF Health faculty. “In redesigning what healthcare is hopefully going to look like, in whatever shape and form that happens to be, it’s clear the model we’ve practiced under in the past is no longer going to suffice because the continuum of care is going to have to be provided at multiple locations. Nothing like this network has clearly ever been done before, and it gives us the opportunity to function as trailblazers, to provide continuity or continuum of care not only in a hospital setting, but also through a network with multiple disparate parts and, moreover, complement the Florida Trauma System.”

Jonathan Perlin, MD, PhD, president of clinical and physician services and chief medical officer for HCA, said the healthcare corporation embraced the opportunity “to have this level of expertise join our effort to improve access to high-quality trauma care in Florida.”

 The five HCA facilities adding trauma centers include:

• Bayonet Point Medical Center in Hudson;
• Blake Medical Center in Bradenton;
• Kendall Regional Medical Center in Miami;  
• Lawnwood Regional Medical Center in Fort Pierce; and
• Orange Park Medical Center in Orange Park.

“Lawnwood was verified as a Level 2 trauma center in May, and we’re in the process of bringing the other four onboard,” said Hurst. “To date, trauma medical directors have been hired for four facilities, and we’re now in the process of finalizing recruitment and the hiring of trauma surgeons and other services to support the program.”

Hurst, who received his undergraduate degree at the University of Arkansas, and served as executive director and CEO of The University Hospital in Cincinnati, Ohio, said no area in the United States is exempt from the shortage of trauma surgeons being trained to meet trauma care needs.

“We as surgery governance in the U.S recognize that a number of years ago, young surgeons pursuing a career in critical care/trauma weren’t being allowed to maintain our operating skills,” explained Hurst, a former member of the American College of Surgeons’ Committee on Trauma. “To help solve that problem, and to recruit and retain young talent, the whole concept of acute care surgery—which encompasses emergency general surgery, surgical general care and trauma—has evolved. That’s one of the initiatives we’ll be trying to institute locally and throughout the combined USF/HCA network.”

The network will provide valuable trauma research data from the five trauma centers to a centralized database center at USF Health—the Florida Trauma Research and Analysis Center—for further evaluation, explained David J. Smith Jr., MD, chair of the USF Department of Surgery.

“Trends that might not be identified by looking at one hospital’s data may show up by looking at five,” he noted. “The research center will help doctors learn how to better treat trauma patients, whether they’re injured in car crashes or suffering from gunshot wounds.”

Klasko pointed out that transformative changes being made by USF like the trauma network aren’t answers to healthcare reform; they’re progressive solutions that will transform the way patients receive care. 

“This kind of environment not only sparks change; it also attracts top talent,” he said. “Dr. Hurst … can help us make Florida the safest state in the nation.”        
For Hurst, access to a well-functioning trauma center provides Floridians the ability to “get back to society, get back to work, and get back to their families faster.”

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