Carr helped set guidelines for hospital emergency rooms for equipment, education

Please put this mug shot into the system. Pictured is pediatric surgeon Dr. Michael Carr. This will accompany a brief in tomorrow’s paper.

There were no statewide requirements for Tennessee ambulances regarding what life-saving equipment they had to carry back in the 1980s. And Dr. Michael Carr remembers that very few ambulances had equipment that was the right size to save the life of a child or newborn.

At the time, a great portion of his work focused on was happily fulfilled by his work as a pediatric surgeon focused on helping babies with birth defects. But he was curious about the rapidly evolving field of traumatology introduced to Americans mostly by doctors who had served in the Vietnam War. They were applying techniques used on soldiers wounded in battle on civilians who suffered trauma-wounds and injuries inflicted by violence or some external force.

Carr arrived in Chattanooga in 1986 and joined University Surgical Associates as the first pediatric surgeon and first fellowship-trained trauma surgeon in Chattanooga. He knew there was an urgent need for emergency rooms and ambulances to understand how to treat children and newborns who were victims of trauma.

"Back then, there was no statewide guidelines for Tennessee ambulance services regarding what emergency equipment they needed to carry and virtually none of the ambulance services carried life-saving equipment properly sized for a child or newborn," Carr said. "There were no statewide standardized requirements for what equipment hospital emergency rooms needed to have on hand. And what they did have was usually designed for adult patients."

Carr was part of a task force that recommended a list of equipment that ambulances in all nine of Tennessee regional command centers must carry. He helped set the guidelines for hospital emergency rooms for equipment and education.

"Soon, Tennessee emergency responders had equipment that was sized properly for children and even newborns," Carr said proudly.

Throughout his career, he continued to help those on the frontlines of medicime. He brought recognition to paramedics, EMT's, firefighters, police, and dispatch personnel who are the first responders to medical and trauma emergencies. Since 1989, he has served as the Pediatric Trauma Medical Director for Children's Hospital at Erlanger. He holds an appointment as an associate professor in the Department of Surgery of the University of Tennessee College of Medicine and is involved in the teaching of medical students and surgical residents. Six of his students have pursued careers in pediatric surgery.

Since birth defects are the focal point of a pediatric surgeon's work, Carr was sensitive to the psychic toll a newborn's tragedies have on the medical personnel trying to save the baby's life-and help give the infant a good chance at a healthy, long life.

"Even a nurse can be shaken by the sight of a baby born with its intestines on the outside of his body," Carr said. "As a doctor, I need to be aware if someone is being overwhelmed by shock or sadness. We're human beings, not machines.

Carr graduated from the University of Louisville School of Medicine in 1974. He has seen trauma care revolutionized over the years of his career.

"We didn't have a scanner in the hospital or the Internet to tell us whether there had been a huge highway accident or a disaster that might be sending patients our way. We knew patients were coming when we heard the helicopter approaching."

Now when he describes Erlanger's regional communications center with computers monitoring the number of Intensive Care Unit statewide available in real time and helicopters now carry paramedics-rather than traffic reporters-when rescuing the injured.

He retired from clinical practice Aug. 1 but is still active as a consultant and mentor. In 2009, he was honored as the National Emergency Medical Services Hero of the Year for his work with the Tennessee Emergency Medical Services for Children, which focuses on ensuring all Tennessee pre-hospital and emergency department personnel have access to pediatric-specific training and are equipped with the appropriate sizes of equipment to stabilize and care for the youngest patients, from newborns to grown adolescents. He has served as chairman of the state Committee on Pediatric Emergency Care (CoPEC) and president of the Tennessee Emergency Medical Services for Children Foundation and remains an active member of these organizations.

In 2015, Dr. Carr was recognized at the Tennessee Star of Life Awards ceremony (EMS regional and state awards) by having the award for the annual overall state winning ambulance service named the Michael Carr Star of Life State Award.

He de-stresses by white water rafting and going on church medical missions to Peru, Brazil, Paraguay, Thailand, Costa Rica, Romania, Tanzania and remote areas of India under siege by guerrilla separatists who would invade villages and kill all the men.

"To get to the church where we had our clinic, we took a ferry then hiked across a desert beach two miles in 100 degree heat carrying our supplies," Carr said, as casually as if he were describing a trip to Publix. "It's a bit difficult walking that distance on sand. Then we rode into the jungle in what was basically a glamorized golf cart."

Carr is a general medical practitioner on those trips, not a surgeon. His tasks can be as humble as removing an enormous thorn that a Tanzanian woman couldn't remove from her foot for a month. But such mundane problems can threaten the lives of the poor. Carr's team met a Romanian teen orphan whose abscessed tooth had caused half his head to be so swollen and inflamed, the doctors worried the child would have a stroke or get blood poisoning. They had no IV to deliver antibiotics, only penicillin. But as the team prayed for the boy, miraculously an ambulance rumbled into the small town on its way to Constantinople. The driver agreed to take the boy to the hospital.

The moments Carr finds most inspiring are the conversations with the patients in which he asks about their lives-then listens to them unburden their hearts. In Costa Rica, the Southern Baptist medical team tended to refugees from the Nicaraguan war.

"Too often doctors just tell the patients what medicine to take and what to do and the patients never feel that they have been seen or heard as a person," Carr muses. "There are times I've asked patients on these mission if they want to tell me more about what goes on in their lives. And they start talking and talking as if it's a release they've wanted for years. Sometimes they break down in tears. That's the power right question has for someone who has wanted to answer for so long."