photograph courtesy regional one health
Editor’s Note: Every year, the national medical group Castle Connolly compiles a list of the best doctors in America. In the Memphis area, the 2024 Top Doctors list comprises more than 400 physicians representing 60 specialties. Here, we introduce you to one of the caregivers who have been a Top Doc time and again. For a complete list, pick up a copy of our June 2024 issue from your favorite newsstand, or — even better — subscribe.
The Elvis Presley Trauma Center at Regional One Health may not be the best-known Elvis attraction in Memphis, but it’s arguably the most vital. As the only designated Level 1 trauma center in a 150-mile radius, it plays a critical role in the well-being of patients from Tennessee, Arkansas, and Mississippi. Dr. Saskya Byerly, a specialist in trauma surgery, general surgery, and critical care, is proud to have made the center her institutional home.
“Taking care of patients and their families on potentially the worst day of their lives is a privilege,” she says, “and I’m very proud to work with an excellent team.” In her eyes, such teamwork is so important that being selected for a Top Doctors spotlight feels odd. “It’s really just a reflection of the quality of the team that I’m a part of.”
Which is not to say she hasn’t distinguished herself in the dozen years since she received her medical degree at the University of Southern California’s Keck School of Medicine. After a residency there, and fellowships at the Los Angeles County Medical Center and the University of Miami’s Ryder Trauma Center, she was well prepared to accept a position in Memphis in 2020, working as an assistant professor of medicine and general surgery at the University of Tennessee Health Science Center, with nearly 70 academic publications to her name, and as a trauma surgeon at Regional One. At the latter, she’s found the culture of teamwork to be exceptional.
“Long term, I think the vision is that we will eventually become an academic medical center to better serve our community, and that we will build a larger hospital, because we currently see four times the trauma volume that the hospital was originally built for.” — Dr. Saskya Byerly
“I think people can appreciate that it’s hard for one person to know everything,” Byerly says. “And so an effort has to be made to coordinate the expertise of all the different areas. That’s not just physicians and nurses but all the different types of therapists. We have a trauma program manager and trauma performance improvement coordinators. We have community outreach and injury prevention coordinators. We have a hospital violence intervention program liaison, a traumatic brain injury coordinator, a trauma registry professional who abstracts all the data in our registries for ongoing internal performance improvement, and quality improvement research to help the care of the injured patient in general. So there’s just a huge team that goes into taking care of our trauma patients. It really takes a village to take care of the traumatically injured patient.”
The way Byerly sees it, the evolution of such advanced coordination over the past decade represents an even more significant shift in the field than technical advances over the same period. “There have been changes in terms of the technology,” she says, “like less invasive approaches, whether they’re endovascular, laparoscopic, or endoscopic, but I would say the other piece is that the coordination of those teams has, I think, improved over time. There’s just a different level of awareness of all those different aspects than when I first started my training.”
The Elvis Presley Trauma Center’s collaborative spirit was fundamental from the beginning, with institutional interests in both clinical and laboratory research. Byerly anticipates continued growth, both in scale and in academic impact. “Long term, I think the vision is that we will eventually become an academic medical center to better serve our community, and that we will build a larger hospital, because we currently see four times the trauma volume that the hospital was originally built for. But our trauma center has a very rich legacy — we just had our 40-year anniversary.”
