Services

Trauma Center

Dear Patients, Families and Community Members:

Currently, official trauma operations at Orange Park Medical Center are suspended while we work through a formal appeal of the decision to the Department of Health. However, please know we will continue to provide care for traumatic injuries as well as, full-service emergency care and our broad range of medical services, without disruption.

We are very disappointed and surprised that we received notification from the Department of Health denying our provisional trauma status. In addition to our formal appeal, we are also reaching out to the Department to ensure residents of Clay County have local access to trauma care. To that end, we intend to appeal this decision and will suspend our operations as a provisional Level II trauma center until we can convince the department to reverse its decision or our appeal is resolved.

While we disagree with this decision, our commitment remains with the community and the patients we serve. Since we received our provisional status over a year ago, we have cared for more than 1,000 trauma patients, saving countless lives that may not have had the same outcome if we were without this level of care. In fact, our trauma center¹s survival rate is over 95%, which is better than the state of Florida¹s average.

Our trauma center has been focused on providing life-saving trauma care to patients in a part of the state where there is the most need. Research shows that someone with the most severe, life-threatening injuries has the best chance for survival if he or she receives trauma care within the first 60 minutes of injury. And when this care is received at a specially equipped trauma center, those chances increase by 25%. Before this trauma center opened its doors, Clay County did not have a local trauma center and our trauma patients had to be transported at least a 30 minute drive to downtown Jacksonville for trauma care. When minutes are the difference between life and death, forcing patients to endure lengthy travel costs lives.

The heavy traffic and population growth we have seen in Northeast Florida has resulted in increased transport times for critical trauma patients to get to the nearest trauma center in downtown Jacksonville. When Shands Jacksonville is not an option because it is too busy, the next closest trauma centers to Orange Park Medical Center are an 80 minute drive to Gainesville or a 120 minute drive to Daytona Beach. Both of these options are well outside of the maximum 60-minute window to give patients lifesaving treatment and the best chance to survive.

As we all know, this decision impacts not just our hospital community, but it will negatively impact the lives of all those in the Orange Park area. We will continue to work with the Florida Department to provide high quality care to our patients.

Finally, we welcome all of our community to please let your voices be heard. Please write us a letter or visit our Facebook site “Orange Park Medical Center” to post a comment about your support for reinstating trauma status at Orange Park. Thank you for your support and visiting our site.

1-800-889-3627

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