Last night, the ABC news program Nightline included a fascinating story going inside the nation’s busiest trauma center — at Houston’s Memorial Hermann Medical Center. One of our board members was interviewed in the piece, Dr. John B. Holcomb, a practicing trauma surgeon at Memorial Hermann and Chief, Division of Acute Care Surgery at the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston.

If you missed the story in its original broadcast, you can view it here on the ABC News site. (The story airs on the website’s video player after a brief commercial.)

The story shows the challenges of working in a Level 1 Trauma Center, with an initial, painful reminder that trauma affects people of all ages — including young children — who are seriously and even critically injured in vehicular accidents, fires and other unexpected emergencies.

Working in a Level 1 Trauma Center is especially challenging in a city like Houston. Houston has only two Level 1 Trauma Centers for a metropolitan area of more than 5 million people, in part because of the damage sustained by Galveston’s medical facilities during Hurricane Ike. (As the story notes, the American College of Surgeons recommends one Level 1 Trauma Center in operation for every million people.) Memorial Hermann’s trauma care unit is often at capacity, with medical teams working steadily to care for seriously and critically injured patients, sometimes flown in by helicopter from as far as 150 miles away.

Kudos to ABC News for highlighting trauma care in this well-done report. For anyone wanting to know more about the state of trauma care in the United States, it’s well worth watching.