Olympic effort: Getting medical care ready for the Games

Physician volunteers prepare for the 2002 Winter Games in Salt Lake City.

By Victoria Stagg Elliott, AMNews staff. May 21, 2001.

Salt Lake City -- In February 2002, Colin K. Grissom, MD, will close up his practice for three weeks to work nonstop out of a trailer at the base of an icy mountain. The avid skier and avalanche survival expert will rest up for a few days, and then do it all over again for a week in March.

Dr. Grissom, a critical care specialist with LDS Hospital in Salt Lake City, is one of several hundred doctors from the area and around the United States volunteering to provide medical care for athletes, spectators and workers during the 2002 Winter Olympic and Paralympic Games in his hometown.

"It's the Olympics," he said. "It's a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to work with something very big."

Salt Lake -- a city of barely 200,000 with nearly a million in the surrounding county -- is most associated with the desert, Mormons and the Osmond family. But next year it will be the home of the 19th Winter Olympic Games and eighth Paralympic Games. The events will bring more than 2,000 Olympic athletes from 80 different countries, 1,100 Paralympians representing 40 countries, 1,200 officials and 9,000 journalists. Thirty thousand people -- including some 1,800 health care workers -- are expected to volunteer, and most of the 730,000 tickets have already been sold.

The Salt Lake Organizing Committee, the organization planning the games, contracted with Intermountain Health Care, a large network that dominates the local market, to set up 36 on-site clinics to help meet medical needs. It is the first time that the Olympics have relied on one contractor for such a large job, although the polyclinic in the Olympic Village will be subcontracted to the University of Utah Health Sciences Center. [...]