Ocular Trauma Center

Traumatic eye injuries affect more than 17,000 people annually, in the U.S. alone. And each year some 2,200 patients from around the world--construction workers to suicide-bombing victims to hockey stars--show up in Birmingham to be treated. Their destination is the Callahan Eye Foundation Hospital (CEFH) at UAB.

The surgical hospital has long held a high profile in the field of eye care and research around the globe, but even that reputation grew by several notches recently when the American Society of Ocular Trauma named the facility as the nation's first, and only, Level I Ocular Trauma Center.

Brian Spraberry, CEO of the Callahan Eye Foundation Hospital, says much of the credit for the facility's world-class imprint on eye care goes to the wide-ranging skills of its medical staff, particularly in the specialty of vitreal retina disease.

One main benefit of the new designation, according to Spraberry, will be an increased awareness of the facility both among medical professionals--first responders, paramedics, etc.--and the general public.

But the Hospital and its support organizations also have an ongoing impact on medical professionals who have not used its services directly, Spraberry adds:

"The presence of so many highly regarded vision-related resources, coupled with the Eye Foundation Hospital and the outstanding ophthalmologists at UAB and within the community, sets the standard of eye-trauma care for the rest of the world."

Those support agencies include the United States Eye Injury Registry, the International Retinal Research Foundation, the Helen Keller Foundation for Research and Education, and the EyeSight Foundation of Alabama.

The Birmingham Eye Trauma Terminology System, which helps eye physicians from various countries overcome the language barrier, was developed at the center in 2002, as was the standardized Ocular Trauma Scoring System, a method for identifying the level of resources necessary to treat a particular condition and predicting patient outcomes following severe eye trauma.

The American Society of Ocular Trauma has several basic requirements for achieving its Level I designation: emergency services must be staffed with physicians and nurses on site 24/7, with the ability to perform emergency surgery within an hour of admission; all equipment and supplies, including ancillary services, must be available around the clock; related medical specialties such as infectious diseases and internal medicine must be accessible within an hour; nursing staff must remain current with ophthalmic and eye-trauma-specific education requirements; the organization must participate in research and education activities, and serve as a community resource.

The technology and practice of eye care have changed dramatically since (CEFH) first opened in 1963 as the Eye Foundation Hospital: "The model has moved very rapidly toward being an efficiently run surgical suite," Spraberry says. "At one point we admitted a lot of patients, but now we essentially perform outpatient surgeries. There are only a few conditions that require admission, such as certain retinal diseases and infections."

The volume of patients that CEFH sees each year, most of them on a short-term basis, is both a challenge and an opportunity for the organization's professionals, according to Spraberry.

"Ask anybody in health care, and they'll tell you they chose their career because everything we do involves a person." he says. "Everything is personal, as opposed to a factory that's responsible for manufacturing some tangible object. Our relationships are with people. And there's something very special that happens when a patient enters a facility with anxiety, and we're able to apply our skills and make them well again. There's nothing else like that feeling."

One challenge that CEFH still faces, Spraberry adds, is using a hospital built in the early 1960s for different purposes than those for which it was designed.

"The building is still very functional," he says. "But being an aging plant, there are a number of things that could be made to work better for our outpatient needs. So one of our goals is to build the type of new facility that our staff, employees, and patients deserve. That's definitely on our radar, for the near future."