Vascular Trauma

The Southside of Chicago has an infamous comparison to being in a war zone and is nicknamed “Chiraq.” The most common vascular injury in Iraq is a femoral artery injury, and comparatively, a femoral artery injury is the most frequently encountered vascular injury in the new trauma center in the Southside of Chicago. The newly minted trauma system built in 2018 would set into motion a trauma triage and care system that had not been in place in almost three decades. An important part of the trauma system would become the evaluation and management of vascular injuries. The obvious default for vascular injuries would be to alert the vascular service every time a patient with a vascular injury entered the trauma bay. The UChicago trauma team accepted that vascular trauma and the immediate stoppage should be under the guidance of the trauma surgeon. The task became how to steeply improve the experience of surgical novices that by the design are seeing a decreasing number of vascular cases during surgical training and have this deficit not impact the care of patients living in the Southside of Chicago. The UChicago trauma team borrowed surgical lessons learned in war to grow the newly formed trauma center. An innovative approach to vascular management popularize in Iraq would find its way to Chiraq. The concept of placing an inexpensive piece of plastic as a temporary vascular shunt became the appropriate innovation to save lives and to maximize a vascular trauma skillset.