Fifty million dollars is about to turn up the heat in Cleveland’s hospital wars.
The Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Foundation has pledged $50 million to Cleveland Clinic to support the health system’s planned Level I trauma center on its main campus and to launch a new Clinic initiative. The gift is a major philanthropic jolt for a project that has already stirred debate among Cleveland hospitals and civic leaders.
According to Crain’s Cleveland Business, the Mandel Foundation’s commitment will underwrite both the trauma center and a related Cleveland Clinic program, although a detailed public breakdown of how the money will be spent has not yet been released by the Clinic or the foundation. Crain’s reported that the funding is expected to speed up planning, staffing and the programmatic work required to bring a top tier trauma program online.
Clinic’s case for a Level I center
The Clinic argues that adding a Level I trauma center on its main campus would cut down on risky patient transfers and get severely injured people to specialized surgeons and round the clock resources more quickly. As the Cleveland Clinic Newsroom puts it, each year hundreds of severely injured patients have to be transferred out of the system, and the new center is being presented as one piece of a broader main campus expansion…