About Us

Patients with immediate, trauma and general surgery critical needs in the Portland-Vancouver area and across the region receive the finest care available at Legacy Emanuel Medical Center and Randall Children’s Hospital. Founded in 1912 it is the one of only two Level 1 trauma centers in the State of Oregon and home to the only burn center between Seattle and Sacramento. In 1978 the hospital opened a helipad and instituted the Life Flight Network, the first life flight system on the US West Coast. 
We feature a Level I Trauma Center, the highest level possible, with life-saving capabilities for serious injuries and illnesses. Legacy Emanuel provides a comprehensive system for receiving these patients, including 2 heliports for emergency helicopters to deliver patients from across the region. Our full-time surgeons are leaders in the statewide trauma system and provide around-the-clock care at our trauma center. We also send surgery teams to hospitals with patients who cannot be moved.

We are verified by the American College of Surgeons, the highest designation for trauma care. We continuously strive to provide the best possible care and maintain a registry of data that drives our continuous quality improvement efforts. In addition, trauma surgeons and researchers throughout the nation are able to partner with us to combine these data in our Trauma Registry and their own to support research activities and improvements in patient care. 

At Legacy Emanuel Trauma we are passionate about providing high quality, evidence-based care that encompasses the whole person. We integrate Trauma Informed Care and Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion principles throughout or practice from before the patient ever comes in our door. We focus on education for our pre-hospital and referring facility partners as well as community outreach interventions to actively prevent moral and physical injury. Once a patient arrives at Legacy Emanuel, our multidisciplinary team approach incorporates experts in all aspect of care to provide a holistic and inclusive care model.

As a Trauma Program, Legacy Trauma Services is passionate about acknowledging past trauma and providing Trauma Informed Care (TIC). TIC recognizes the impact that past and present traumatic events have on patients’ mental and physical health and attempts to integrate that knowledge into the provision of care in order to avoid re-traumatization. TIC focuses on providing care with the core principles of safety, transparency, peer support, collaboration, empowerment, and humility. For more about TIC please see SAHMSA’s website.

Legacy Health is committed to being a healthcare organization in which DEI is not just an idea, but a reality. To realize this vision, Legacy established a Diversity Advisory Council (DAC) in August 2010 to guide the direction and focus the efforts in the areas of diversity, inclusion and cultural competency. The DAC develops, recommends and implements strategies and actions to achieve our diversity goals and priorities for patients at Legacy Health.

Legacy Trauma Services is involved in clinical, science based, surgical education, injury prevention, and translational research spanning the entire breadth of the discipline of trauma and critical care. Our physicians, PAs, nurses, and registrars are dedicated to improving health outcomes for critically injured patients and those in acute surgical need. We use both institutional databases and large-scale data sources to ask clinically relevant questions to improve the care of our patients. Our surgeons actively participate in multi-center studies aimed at addressing clinical topics that have helped shape the management of trauma and critical care internationally.