Seven years ago, Gregory Peck was working as a busy trauma surgeon, often spending more than 100 hours a week keeping people alive in the operating room or the intensive care unit. Then his father, a contractor, died because he wasn’t wearing an anchored safety harness while working on a roof. “I realized at that time that no matter what I could have done, even if he was brought into my operating room, I would not have been able to save my father’s life. The accident was 100 percent preventable,” said Peck. “I needed to find a way to prevent the type of accident that led to my father’s death in the first place, rather than waiting to react to the devastating injuries he sustained.”
Today, Peck, associate professor of surgery at Rutgers Robert Wood Johnson Medical School, is one of two critical care surgeons in the country funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) focusing his research on prevention over emergency care and surgical intervention. To read the full story.