Poster Details

Poster Submitter: Frazer Tessema, BA

Department: Pritzker School of Medicine, The University of Chicago

Email Address: ftessema@uchicago.edu

Role: Student

Project Lead: Tanya Zakrison, MD, MPH / Department of Surgery, Section of Trauma & Acute Care Surgery

Project Collaborators:

  • Gabrielle Lapping-Carr, MD / Faculty
  • Murtala Affini, BA / Student
  • Isaiah Selkridge, BA / Student
  • Akosua Oppong, MPH / Student
  • Tanisha Jones, NP / Nurse

Departments Included in Project: Family Medicine, Medicine, Pediatrics, Pritzker School of Medicine, Surgery, Other, (Section of Hematology-Oncology)

Project Classification: Safety, Effectiveness, Patient Centeredness

Does the work incorporate equity?

"Sickle Cell Trait & Multisystem Trauma: An Unaddressed Urgent Knowledge Gap" Our project is fundamentally centered on improving health equity for both sickle cell trait patients and multisystem trauma victims. We first identify literature that has found sickle cell trait patients may have worse outcomes in settings of acidosis and hypoxia, and also may have greater baseline risk of venous thromboembolism. Our work then extrapolates how these findings may impact multisystem trauma patients, like those seen at UChicago, and seeks out literature that has examined this link. Our paper finds that no prospective or intentional research has ever been done on this subject in 110+ years (only 3 case reports that incidentally examined the phenomenon). This gap in knowledge is a major healthcare inequity with outsized importance for the Black community (about 8-10% of Black Americans have the trait). The lack of knowledge likely contributes to racial health disparities in the US. We propose several calls to action to rectify this situation and offer more equity to surgical care. These calls to action include UChicago-specific programming now taking place, such as: (1) the beginning of a clinical trial to study the impact of sickle cell trait on multisystem trauma outcomes and (2) the development of new UChicago surgical protocols for how to treat sickle cell trait patients receiving traumatic injury care. We hope that such research can help victims of multisystem trauma locally, and with time both nationally and globally. Relatedly, we also hope this work may be important in helping to save lives impacted by the epidemic of traumatic violence facing many global communities, including ours in Chicago.

Does this work address any of the UChicago Medicine quality priorities as listed on the Clinical Excellence Scorecard?

Patient Experience, Mortality Reduction

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