Focus at Four: St. Joseph Health CEO on reassignment to Level III trauma center

BRYAN, Texas (KBTX) – St. Joseph Regional Health Center has been reassigned to a Level III trauma center, instead of the previous Level II trauma center designation it held.

This means that the closest Level II or Level I trauma center to Bryan-College Station is in Temple or Houston.

Kim Shaw, the President and CEO of St. Joseph Health said that the reassignment was mostly an issue of need in the community.

“The Level II requires an in-house [operating room] team which is, you know, a nurse and a scrub tech, for a 15-minute response time, and that’s 24/7. It requires a quicker response time from our surgeons and other types of specialties that are on call. Level III is an OR response time within 30 minutes. We have about 1,500 or more trauma activations a year at Saint Joseph in Bryan, and less than 1% of the time, did any of those patients require surgery in that immediate time frame that was required for Level II,” she said.

Shaw said the service was intensive, and not being used as often.

“We were underutilizing our staff, which is our staff and anesthesia, having them be here at night when they weren’t being utilized. With nationwide workforce shortages and the challenge to get staff in, we really need to be good stewards of our resources while serving our community,” she said.

But Shaw mentioned they still have many of the same resources as when they were a Level II designation.

“It’s not going to change the care that you receive. We still have a team on call for trauma. We still have our helicopter, and we’re putting a second helicopter in Centerville. We are going to continue doing trauma care, it’s just that response time isn’t needed. That’s not the type of trauma that we’re seeing in our community,” she said.

Shaw said that the level of trauma care needed won’t be known until someone is out in the field, likely by EMS.

“We will take all of those patients and stabilize them if they are above our level like for Level I. We’ve done this for years when they come to our ER, we stabilize and transfer them to a Level I trauma center so that would continue. We haven’t changed any of our specialties that are on call for us. None of those services are going away. It’s just a matter of the OR response time and what the community need is,” she said.