“DURING the final DOH TWG visit of the year, we were once again reminded that this center is truly in a league of its own,” wrote Dr. Aireen Patricia M. Madrid in her social media post summing up their recent visit to the Southern Philippines Medical Center (SPMC) Trauma Institute last week, November 13, 2025.
Dr. Madrid, executive secretary of the Department of Health Technical Working Group for Trauma Centers (DOH-TWG), was with Dr. Joseph T. Juico, chief of the Trauma Surgery and Critical Care Section of the Department of Surgery of Jose R. Reyes Memorial Medical Center, to quiz the key personnel of the SPMC Trauma Center, as part of the regular monitoring of the trauma centers all over the country, to assess the centers’ capabilities.
“I remain in awe, a genuine fan of this institution that is a different animal altogether — relentless, disciplined, and deeply committed to excellence,” Dr. Madrid’s post continued.
There are 20 National Specialty Center (1), Advanced Comprehensive (6), and Basic Comprehensive (13) Centers in the country, of which SPMC Trauma Center is classified as Advanced or AC.
“So far, it’s way above expectations,” Dr. Juico said of their inspection as we went through the emergency department and the blood bank after the session with the personnel. “Ang taas ng standard niya (It holds a high standard).”
“It is actually way beyond the basic requirements that the DOH requires,” he said adding that for this year, they have already visited 12 government hospitals with trauma care, including SPMC.
That means they still need to visit eight more.
What earned the SPMC the superlatives from the monitoring team are the systems in place that lowered its mortality rate to just 2 percent, covering the emergency and trauma cases who are eventually confined in the hospital. The trauma center is now looking to improve numbers, even among those who have just been brought in, and especially to encourage patients to return for follow-up treatment.
“Patients when discharged no longer return for followup for unknown reasons, and we don’t know if they are having complications, that’s why we are trying strict monitoring,” Dr. Benedict Edward Valdez, Director of the SPMC Institute of Emergency Trauma and Critical Care.
To encourage patients to return for follow-up consultations as well as to prevent preventable morbidities or those who suffer from complications despite surviving the emergency trauma, education plays a vital role.
“This is an avenue of education and organizing to increase awareness for trauma prevention,” he said. This will include organizing trauma prevention support groups in communities.
Prevention is always cheaper than hospitalization.
The center’s success relies on a set of protocols laid out by its Five Mortality Busters. The five are: 1. Trauma team activation, 2. Red blanket protocol, 3.Massive transfusion protocol, 4. Surgical ICU policy, and 5. Early Ambulatory Surgery for Trauma and ER Resuscitation.
Most expansive is the trauma team activation the moment a subject is brought in as an emergency trauma and critical care subject.
In the trauma team activation, which SPMC started implementing in 2024, the team is composed of a Trauma fellow/senior resident, a Trauma Emergency Department (ED) rotator/intermediate or junior resident, an ED senior resident, an ED charge/primary nurse, an ED secondary nurse, a Scribe nurse, an ED technician/nursing aid, a Clinical pharmacist, a Radiology technician, a Respiratory therapist, a Medical technologist, a Blood Bank representative, Social services, Security, Anesthesiology senior resident, Emergency Radiology senior resident, an OR charge nurse, and a Surgical Intensive Care Unit (Sicu) charge nurse.
A Red Blanket protocol is an emergency trauma-care process used in hospitals to rapidly transfer critically ill or haemodynamically unstable patients, or patients whose blood pressure is too low, their circulation is failing, or vital signs are showing that the body is in shock, from the emergency department (ED) straight to the operating theater with as few delays as possible.
The trauma team is key to all four other mortality busters.
To further reduce mortality and morbidity rates, the Institute this year partnered with the Davao Regional Medical Center in Tagum City, Cotabato Regional Medical Center in Cotabato City, and Northern Mindanao Medical Center in Cagayan de Oro City to “systematically improve trauma care standards and outcomes for all communities across Mindanao”.
Valdez pointed out that SPMC is the first training trauma and critical care in Mindanao and third in the Philippines. The other two are JRRMC in Metro Manila and Jose B. Lingad Memorial General Hospital in San Fernando, Pampanga.
SPMC Institute of Emergency Trauma and Critical Care is the first institute in the Philippines. All others, including NSC JRRMC, do not have such an institute.
Delivering the “wow” factor to all this is the Section of Diving, Hyperbaric Medicine, and Difficult Wounds in SPMC’s Department of Emergency Medicine. SPMC has a single-chamber hyperbaric and a ten-person chamber, which is the preferred machine, given that patients can stand and walk around inside and does not trigger claustrophobia. The ten-man chamber also consumes lesser oxygen than the single-chamber unit. The ten-person chamber was assigned to SPMC during President Rodrigo R. Duterte’s administration. This helped SPMC a lot during the Covid pandemic and continues to save so many lives today.
All these effort, Valdez said, is geared toward making the system the SPMC EMed created to be applied at the national level.
“It takes a good system to save a life. It takes true collaboration to sustain it,” he said. SAE