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Front and Center: Dr. Juan Duchesne
Published on Monday, January 27, 2025
By: Rachel Vanderford, rvanderford@umc.edu
Photos By: Melanie Thortis/ UMMC Communications
Dr. Juan Duchesne’s devotion to helping where it is most needed has brought him back to the University of Mississippi Medical Center after nearly two decades away.
Duchesne, who was an assistant professor and trauma surgeon at UMMC from 2005-2006, returns as the director of the Medical Center’s Level I trauma center. He said being back in Mississippi after all these years feels like coming home.
“It’s home to me,” he said. “The only reason why I left is because the people who trained me in New Orleans were just devastated by Hurricane Katrina, and I knew they needed help. I wanted to go back to give them a hand.”
His compassion for those most in need has been the driving force of his career. Duchesne received his general surgery residency and fellowship training at the Louisiana State University Health Science Center in New Orleans after completing medical school at the Ponce School of Medicine in Puerto Rico.
In the aftermath of Katrina, he found himself working in a city struggling to rebuild.
“I started working with Tulane when New Orleans didn’t have a trauma center,” said Duchesne. “They had nothing. We were working out of what was essentially an abandoned warehouse that we converted into an ER and OR specifically for trauma.”
As the city recovered, the injuries he treated reflected the pains of the rebuilding process—construction-related falls, nail gun injuries and lung trauma.
“We just did the best we could to get them back to some kind of normalcy,” he said. “It was rough. We did everything from emergency care to rehab because there was nowhere else for people to go.”
Even in the wake of this tragedy, Duchesne said he often thought about the unique challenges that Mississippi faces.
“This place has always had my heart,” he said. “I think when I left, I left very empty hearted because people here are a different kind of people than what I was used to from my training in New Orleans. Mississippi has a lack of access to things, from education to health care, all across the state.
“When I was here before, I saw so many preventable traumas—accidents on farms, hunting injuries, things that proper education and injury prevention programs could address. I always felt like there was so much more that I could do here, ways that I could help. And I wanted to help. I care about Mississippians and their well-being. That’s why I call this home.”
Over the years, Duchesne kept in touch with UMMC, visiting occasionally to check in on the progress being made. Last year, when he saw the Medical Center was searching for a new trauma director, he knew it was his call to return.
“It was so obvious to me,” he said. “This is my time to come back.”
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“Dr. Duchesne brings a mix of the experience of building and leading trauma teams and the passion and love for UMMC", said Dr. Christopher Anderson, James D. Hardy professor and chair of the Department of Surgery. “We are fortunate to be able to recruit him back to lead our program forward. In my opinion, we have a very capable and excellent multidisciplinary trauma group at UMMC, and we are ready to take that next step in our trauma program. He is the right person to help lead these efforts.”
Now, with UMMC’s trauma center designated as Level I by the Mississippi State Department of Health in 2023, Duchesne is focused on achieving national accreditation.
“It is our goal to make this place, our home, a nationally verified trauma center,” said Duchesne. “We do not need to reinvent any new service. We have all of the services here. It's about ensuring everything complies with the standards and providing standardized, top-tier care to all patients.”
Duchesne’s passion for trauma care began with a personal tragedy. As a teenager in Puerto Rico, he dreamed of becoming a neurosurgeon, a vision he shared with his brother. But at 18, his brother was killed in a car accident. Duchesne was the first to arrive at the scene.
“I broke the news to my family. I had to kind of be the champion for them. My dad is a doctor. My mom is a nurse. But I was the one who was able to hang in there and talk to responders. I saw them doing what they do best, but I kept asking myself ‘Why did this happen? What didn’t happen?’ It came to me easily after that incident that I wanted to change the way these kinds of accidents are handled— or at least figure out how to improve care.”
That experience shifted Duchesne’s focus from neurosurgery to trauma surgery.
“After medical school, when I did my applications, my personal statement said that I wanted to make trauma centers from nothing. And I did exactly that.”
Throughout his career, Duchesne has pioneered changes in trauma care, particularly in the field of resuscitation. In Louisiana, he helped establish a Level II trauma center where one didn’t exist before. He also led groundbreaking research on resuscitation practices, publishing a landmark paper in 2008 that introduced the concept of balanced resuscitation.
“Working with the military, we learned that trauma patients had better outcomes when we used a 1:1:1 ratio of blood, plasma and platelets,” he explained. “Our paper was the first from a civilian trauma center in the U.S. to document this, and it changed the way resuscitation is practiced in the civilian world—all across the country.”
In 2018, Duchesne and his team began using whole blood for trauma patients, a practice that dramatically improved outcomes.
His innovations also extended to pre-hospital care, working with New Orleans EMS to equip ambulances with blood products and other lifesaving tools.
“Ambulance ground transportation started carrying two units of blood, tranexamic acid and calcium in ambulances,” he said. “It made a huge difference. Mortality for patients with severe hemorrhage dropped from around 30-35% to around 9-10%. That has dramatically changed a lot the way we practiced resuscitation in New Orleans and now nationwide.”
To share those advancements and other transformative discoveries, Duchesne co-founded Selective Pre-Hospital Resuscitative Care (SPARC) Academy, a non-profit organization dedicated to training first responders.
“We’ve worked with fire departments, EMS, FBI SWAT teams and even the military,” he said. “We teach them the skills and provide them with the tools they need to keep patients alive until they reach the hospital. It’s not just about transporting patients. It’s about giving them a real chance to survive.”
At UMMC, Duchesne plans to replicate the success he achieved in New Orleans, focusing on both clinical care and academic research.
“I think that my goal was when I joined Tulane to make them a powerhouse in trauma. My goal is to make them a powerhouse here—not only clinical trauma, but in academic research. I love research and I have published over 200 publications and presentations about resuscitation. Those tools are already here. It’s just about orchestrating the minds and resources to make it happen.
“Mississippi is my home, and this is my time to give back,” he said. “Together, we can create something extraordinary for our state.”