Cleveland Clinic pitched its plans to open a new Level I trauma center directly to residents this week, drawing mixed reactions from community members weighing in for the first time.
The Clinic announced in January that it wants to open a high-level trauma center at its main campus, spurring debate around whether that was best for patients. Cleveland already has two existing Level I trauma centers, one at University Hospitals and one at MetroHealth.
A few residents at the Tuesday night Ward 6 meeting, which took place at the nonprofit Fairhill Partners, said they’d been asking the Clinic to provide trauma care on the East Side for decades. Others worried that adding a new center could hurt existing hospitals, like MetroHealth. Residents also asked whether the hospital would change its police department’s policy of detaining residents who bring in gunshot victims. Level I trauma centers are set up to treat the highest-level injuries, including gunshot wounds.
Still others asked whether the move would mean the hospital makes more money.
Dr. Scott Steele, president of the Cleveland Clinic’s main campus, said trauma systems are not financially “a big benefit,” adding that the goal of adding a Level I trauma center is to take care of patients.
“We feel that we have the expertise and the experience to take care of the most complex medical and surgical patients — and we also want to be able to do that for our trauma patients,” Steele told residents at the community meeting. Ward 6 includes the Clinic’s main campus on Euclid Avenue.
Cleveland Clinic officials said the hospital currently transfers more than 600 trauma patients a year to other hospital systems, one reason the hospital cited as a need for more trauma care. That’s because state law requires trauma patients to be treated by designated trauma centers, which have a specialized staff of surgeons and other doctors available round-the-clock. Steele said these transfers delay care and are “an opportunity for things to potentially go awry.”
Leaders probed other possible incentives for adding a center, though. Council President Blaine Griffin, whose ward includes the Clinic’s main campus, asked whether other nationally ranked hospitals that the Clinic is compared to have Level I trauma centers. Steele confirmed that they do. Griffin said that could create market pressure to compete.
Cleveland Clinic shares more details on trauma care
To get certified, Level I trauma centers need to see 1,200 patients a year.
MetroHealth, the county’s public hospital, has said that the area cannot sustain a third Level I trauma center. In a letter to the Cleveland Clinic’s CEO last week, Dr. Christine Alexander-Rager, MetroHealth’s CEO, wrote that reducing the number of patients who come to existing trauma centers could dilute the trauma team’s skills.
Steele and Dr. Jeffrey Claridge, the hospital’s head of trauma, said they expect there to be enough trauma cases for the Clinic to meet the required metric.
“There’s going to be enough numbers to go around,” Steele said. “Obviously we would love to have an opportunity one day where those trauma numbers would go down, but that’s just not what we’re seeing.”
After the meeting, a spokesperson with the Clinic said that the hospital doesn’t have the specific numbers Steele was referencing to share. Ohio’s Trauma Registry shows a nearly 35% growth in trauma injuries in Cuyahoga County between 2018 and 2024.
One growing cause of trauma, Clinic leaders said, is falls. Falls made up more than 60% of the trauma cases at hospitals within the Northern Ohio Trauma System in 2024. Most patients are older adults. With an aging population, these numbers are going up, a spokesperson for the Clinic wrote in an email.
Alongside the addition of the trauma center, Clinic leaders said the hospital would invest in an expansion of the emergency department on its main campus, Steele said. The new Neurological Institute, which is set to open in 2027, will allow staff to move out of the emergency department and open up space there.
Steele said that patients often have an issue with long wait times in emergency departments.
“We’ll be able to improve that emergency care,” Steele said.
Signal Cleveland asked a Clinic spokesperson after the meeting how many beds would be added in the emergency department. The spokesperson said that information is not available yet.
Steele also argued that the new trauma center could decrease costs by cutting down on the cost of transferring patients to other hospitals and duplicative tests that may be done when a patient is transferred between health systems. That was a rebuttal to arguments from MetroHealth’s CEO that the new center could raise costs.
Cleveland Clinic’s history with trauma care
Other community members spoke of pressure on the Cleveland Clinic to provide more trauma care, not less.
Bob Render, a Ward 6 resident, said he remembers a woman in the 1990s who was accidentally shot on the East Side and taken in an ambulance to MetroHealth. She passed away.
“Our argument was, had there been a Level I trauma center at Cleveland Clinic, they would have taken her there. She would not have died,” Render said. “We ended up protesting about that.”
Valarie McCall, a Ward 6 Democratic club leader and a former chief of staff for Mayor Frank Jackson, said she remembered protesting the closure of the Clinic’s Huron Road hospital in East Cleveland more than 15 years ago. The Clinic said it closed the Level II trauma center because there wasn’t enough traffic to support it.
Claridge said that the Clinic wanted to bring Level I trauma care on-board earlier but didn’t have the space.
“They didn’t have the space to put the patients. Now they do,” Claridge said.
University Hospitals opened its Level I trauma center several years after the Huron Road hospital closed.
Chief defends gunshot wound policy
Two residents asked leaders of the Cleveland Clinic whether it would change a policy of detaining residents who bring in gunshot victims, which Signal Cleveland reported on last December. A trauma center would, by nature, see more gunshot victims.
Kayla Griffin Green, the former president of Cleveland’s NAACP, said that the rule could deter Good Samaritans from bringing victims to the hospital. In December, the Cleveland NAACP asked the hospital system to put a moratorium on the policy.
“There has to be something different in how we manage people who are bringing in gunshot victims,” she said.
Cleveland Clinic Police Chief Deon McCaulley said there was “no need” to change the policy.
McCaulley said detention “is just holding a person for an interview.” Doing this after a resident brings in a gunshot wound victim is essential police work, he said. Otherwise the department may fail to gather information crucial to investigating a crime.
“It’s a simple conversation,” McCaulley said. “That’s all the detention is, is a simple conversation to say, ‘Thank you for bringing this individual to get help at the hospital. Now tell us, where did you find this individual? Who is he? Where did it happen?’ … And when that conversation is over, the person is generally released.”
Signal Cleveland reported last year on one instance where a man brought a gunshot victim to the Clinic’s emergency room at the main campus. That man was pinned against a car and handcuffed after Cleveland Clinic police officers said he didn’t provide his identification quickly. He was detained for about a half an hour. He said the experience felt like a punishment for a life-saving good deed.
Griffin Green said that the city’s other two Level I trauma centers don’t have the same policy of detaining people who drive gunshot victims. A representative from MetroHealth present at the meeting confirmed the hospital does not have this policy.
But McCaulley said it’s a normal police practice, even if other hospital police departments don’t have it in writing. He added that it would be a dereliction of duty if police did not initiate an investigation when a gunshot wound victim arrives at the hospital.
“As long as it is in policy, I can hold my officers accountable for what they did or did not do in that instance, rather than just depending on, ‘This is how it’s normally done,’” McCaulley said. “So I would argue that the fact that we have a policy probably puts us ahead of some departments that may not have developed that policy yet.”