By Fox23.com News Staff
TULSA, Okla. — Ascension St. John hosted its 15th annual Trauma Symposium, providing information about the latest trauma care practices to healthcare workers in a variety of fields.
“We’re here today for our annual Trauma Symposium for Ascension St. John Medical Center, which is allowing us to gather with different types of healthcare providers to learn about cutting edge trauma treatment for the betterment of the care of our patients,” said Dr. Rachel Tyler, a trauma surgeon at Ascension St. John.
Dr. Tyler said the event is all about allowing doctors and other healthcare professionals to learn from one another.
“I am a trained general surgeon with a specialized training in trauma surgery, so we’re here to help teach other health care providers about how to better care for our patients from nurses to pre-hospital providers, therapy providers that help our patients while they’re in the hospital. We’re wanting to collaborate with everyone and learn new things from each other.”
Krista Norrid, Ascension St. John’s Trauma Program Manager, said hosting one of these events each year is important.
“Trauma care evolves. It’s always changing and so we want to be able to bring that education to the community. Something changes, we want—as the Level I center in Tulsa—to be able to get that education out to the community.”
“Patients that come in that have been involved in some sort of a trauma. [They’re] typically involved in, it can be a variety of mechanisms, most commonly motor vehicle collisions, motorcycle crashes, ATV collisions and then we even see things like ground level falls, assault and then of course other violent type injuries from stabbings or gunshot wounds. Patients that come in that are critical or sick from those type of injuries are the ones that we’re going to see go directly to our trauma resuscitation bays.”
The event featured vendors providing education in a variety of fields including orthopedics, neurosurgery, prosthetics and medications.
Attendees were also able to learn from several seminars scheduled throughout the day.
Norrid explained, “We started our day with trauma patients’ family in the trauma bay. When a trauma patient, EMS brings them in to us, we have a special bay that they go to in our ER. Kind of nationally, they’re playing around with should families be involved in that? On one hand, it’s really good for a family to see what’s going on, but it could also be really scary. We started the day with a little bit of that, then we went into obstetric trauma, so pregnant moms, taking care of them. You take care of them and then you take care of the baby. We had orthopedics, the advances in if you break your femur, your leg, your arm, what happens in the emergency room through the OR for orthopedics. Then we’re going to end our day with pediatrics and then a case. A patient that we took care of from start to finish has come back and we’ll see that span and see how that family is doing.”
According to Ascension St. John, the most common type of traumatic injuries they see this time of year are head injuries from people not wearing helmets while riding a motorcycle, motorized scooter or bike.
