Groote Schuur Hospital launches ‘trauma surges’ funding project ahead of Easter weekend

14 Apr 2025

The Emergency Funds for Emergency Surgeries project, launched at Groote Schuur Hospital before the 2025 Easter weekend, is providing surgical teams with the resources for additional emergency procedures.

Groote Schuur Hospital in Cape Town has launched a new project, Emergency Funds for Emergency Surgeries, in the lead-up to the Easter long weekend, with the aim of improving the facility’s ability to manage surges in trauma cases.

The Groote Schuur Hospital Trust has raised just over R300,000, through donations from the insurance company Metropolitan and private individuals, to fund the first three months of the project. Its goal for the year is to enable an additional 70 emergency theatre lists during surge periods, assisting about 200 patients over and above the hospital’s existing capacity.

Professor Lydia Cairncross, head of general surgery at Groote Schuur Hospital, explained that in every theatre service there were both planned operations and procedures for patients requiring emergency care.

“The emergency component of our work is not predictable – it shifts and changes. But there are some patterns that we’ve seen emerge, particularly with regard to trauma emergencies. We see that trauma emergencies tend to surge at particular times of the year,” she said at a press briefing on the emergency surgeries project on Monday, 14 April.

“They surge over long weekends; when there are public holidays; around the Christmas period; and at the end-of-month period, when there’s a lot more money in circulation in the system, and there’s a very distressing correlation between alcohol, drugs and trauma.”

The fixed service capacity in the hospital’s emergency surgical theatres meant that when trauma numbers went up, all patients on the theatre lists would wait longer, said Cairncross.

“Our idea with this [project] was to create a fund where we could have additional theatre lists to provide surge capacity within our emergency system, which would allow us to match the surge in trauma which happens at these predictable times of the year,” she said.

Of the 70 additional emergency theatre lists the hospital is aiming to enable, 50 will take place weekly to prepare for weekend trauma, while 20 are planned around high-risk public holiday periods, including the Easter long weekend.

“We run two theatres all the time, and what we want to do is create a third theatre when we need extra capacity,” said Cairncross.

As there are already theatre rooms at the hospital going unused, the money raised for the project will fund staffing teams to perform the additional operations.

“That staffing team is primarily anaesthesia and nursing [personnel], and some of the support staff around that. Almost all of the money will go towards the staffing of the theatre,” said Cairncross.

High trauma burden

South Africa carries one of the highest trauma burdens in the world, according to Dr Deidre McPherson, trauma surgeon at Groote Schuur Hospital. However, she noted that the effects of trauma on the surgical system were often “under-recognised and vastly under-resourced”.

“[Groote Schuur Hospital] serves not only the people of Cape Town, but also patients referred from across the Western Cape and beyond. Every week, our team at Groote Shuur faces the reality of South Africa’s trauma epidemic – road traffic collisions, stabbings, gunshot wounds, falls and [broken] bones… What makes it more overwhelming is that they often come not one by one, but in … waves of trauma that flood our emergency departments and theatres, pushing our already stretched system to its limits,” she said.

“Suddenly, our surgical team must make an impossible decision – who goes to theatre first? Who has to wait? And who might not make it at all? This isn’t due to poor planning, it’s due to impossible constraints. We work with dedication and urgency, but when our system is already stretched thin, the weight of these decisions becomes unbearable.

“A trauma surge is not a hypothetical disaster scenario. It is a routine reality for us, and its consequences reach far beyond the trauma bay.”

Sister Nina Watson, assistant manager of theatre nursing at Groote Schuur, said that while the emergency list sat at around 15 to 20 people on an ordinary day, it could go up to about 50 patients during a trauma surge.

“We get through about four or five [patients] during the day. We get through anywhere between five and seven patients at night… If you’re only getting through 10 to 12 over a 24-hour cycle, and you’re adding patients to that board every day, you’re getting more and more people on the board,” she explained.

During trauma surges, patients with less urgent conditions are more likely to have their procedures delayed, sometimes multiple times.

Dr Maritz Laubscher, orthopaedic surgeon at Groote Schuur Hospital, said that orthopaedic surgery patients were often disproportionately disadvantaged as their injuries were seldom life-threatening, meaning they were “pushed to the bottom of the queue”.

“Not only is it inconvenient for the patients. Once you have a significant delay in surgery, it also makes the surgery more complex. It reduces the expected outcome for the patients. And often, patients block beds, so it’s got a knock-on effect down the chain in the hospital,” he said.

Kristy Evans, executive director of the Groote Schuur Hospital Trust, said the Emergency Funds for Emergency Surgeries project would give the surgical teams the resources to “meet the need where it matters most”. She called on individuals, businesses and philanthropic partners to assist the trust in raising an additional R1.86-million that would allow the project to be sustained beyond June. DM

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High trauma burden