Article Text

The history of Harborview Medical Center and the Washington State Trauma System
  1. Eileen M Bulger1,
  2. Janet Griffith Kastl2,
  3. Ronald V Maier1
  1. 1 Department of Surgery, University of Washington, Harborview Medical Center, Seattle, Washington, USA
  2. 2 Washington State Department of Health, Office of EMS and Trauma, Olympia, Washington, USA
  1. Correspondence to Dr Eileen M Bulger; ebulger{at}u.washington.edu

Abstract

Harborview Medical Center serves as the sole adult and pediatric level I trauma center for Washington State, and its faculty have led efforts to develop comprehensive systems of trauma care across the country. The Washington State trauma system is an inclusive system that was developed based on data-driven decisions to distribute resources based on population need. This article seeks to explore the history of Harborview Medical Center and the development of the Washington State trauma system to identify the guiding principles and lessons learned, which can facilitate system development for a host of time-sensitive medical conditions.

  • trauma systems
  • history
  • trauma center quality

This is an Open Access article distributed in accordance with the Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial (CC BY-NC 4.0) license, which permits others to distribute, remix, adapt, build upon this work non-commercially, and license their derivative works on different terms, provided the original work is properly cited and the use is non-commercial. See: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/

Statistics from Altmetric.com

Request Permissions

If you wish to reuse any or all of this article please use the link below which will take you to the Copyright Clearance Center’s RightsLink service. You will be able to get a quick price and instant permission to reuse the content in many different ways.

Supplementary materials

Footnotes

  • Contributors All authors contributed substantially to the manuscript including submission of historical documents, personal interviews to verify historical facts, and drafting and critical review of the manuscript.

  • Competing interests None declared.

  • Provenance and peer review Commissioned; externally peer reviewed.