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Eden Medical Center

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Every 15 Minutes

   Eden Medical Center’s Trauma Center has served Southern Alameda County for more than 20 years. More than 53 percent of injuries are a result of a motor vehicle accident, and more than 40 percent of those involve drugs or alcohol.

   To save lives, Eden Medical Center partners with local law enforcement and high schools to present the Every 15 Minutes program, which emphasizes injuries a serious accident can cause to the human body and the impact an accident can have on family and friends.

   Because we are a trauma center, the realism we can bring is profound and unique. From demonstrating the emergency helicopter transport, to the inner workings of the complex hospital trauma room, to living with the impact of the aftermath, the Every 15 Minutes program targets one of the toughest audiences to reach.

   The program’s name comes from the statistic that every 15 minutes, someone in the United States dies in an alcohol-related vehicle accident. Eden’s two-day program realistically stages an accident involving five student victims. One student, pronounced dead on the scene, is body-bagged and taken to the morgue. The unharmed student driver fails a sobriety test, is handcuffed and placed into a police car. The remaining critically injured students experience a full mock-trauma scenario at Eden. The next day, students, parents and others speak about the personal impact of the accident.

   “I can’t get that scene of seeing a dead, bloody body ejected onto the front of the car. It was so real and so close that it was so hard to believe that this was just a simulation. I’m just glad that my school did this for us because it just hit me with the realization that real people do die. Thank you to everyone involved with this program; it completely altered my life.”