Retired Combat Surgeon Leads Effort to Ready Greater Cincinnati Hospitals for Large-Scale Emergencies

A trauma surgeon who spent four decades treating the wounded in combat hospitals is now focused on a quieter mission at home: making sure the region’s hospitals, first responders, and residents are ready before the next disaster strikes.

Dr. Jay Johannigman, a Cincinnati-based trauma and critical care surgeon and retired U.S. Army Reserve colonel, has spent the months since his return to the city working with regional hospitals, emergency medical services, and public safety agencies to strengthen how Greater Cincinnati responds to mass-casualty events. His approach treats readiness less as a state of alert and more as a design problem, one solved in the calm periods long before an emergency ever arrives.

From the Battlefield to the Home Front

Johannigman returned to Cincinnati in July 2025 and retired from the military that November, closing out 46 years of service that included multiple combat deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan. Across that career, he served as a flight surgeon, a trauma director at combat hospitals, and a leader in the systems that move critically injured patients out of war zones and into definitive care.

That experience is now the foundation of his civilian work. He helped establish the Cincinnati Center for the Sustainment of Trauma and Readiness Skills, known as Cincinnati CSTARS, one of the first military-civilian trauma training partnerships in the country. For more than two decades, the program has trained military medical teams alongside civilian trauma staff, converting battlefield lessons into everyday practice for surgeons and first responders throughout the region.

Building Readiness Before the Crisis

Much of Johannigman’s current effort centers on preparation that the public rarely sees. He has worked to bring hospital trauma teams together with firefighters, paramedics, and emergency management officials for joint training exercises, the kind of coordinated practice that determines whether a response holds together when a real emergency unfolds.

His work also extends to hospital preparedness planning for severe weather, active shooter incidents, and large-scale accidents, along with community education on evacuation planning, blood donation, and how trauma systems actually operate. The through-line is a conviction he has carried from the military into civilian medicine: that the outcome of a crisis is largely decided by the work done before it begins.

“Lives are saved by good communication, quick action, and teams that know exactly what to do, whether you’re in a war zone or back home,” Johannigman has said of his approach.

A Focus on the Region’s Aging Population

Alongside the broad preparedness work, Johannigman has taken on a challenge specific to the community he serves: injuries among older adults. As Greater Cincinnati’s senior population grows, he has advocated for an integrated, multidisciplinary model of geriatric injury care, one focused on preventing falls, improving how they are treated, and reducing the complications that so often follow a serious fall in an older patient.

Falls are the leading cause of injury for adults 65 and older, and older residents make up a significant share of the trauma cases treated in the region. For the many local families caring for aging parents and grandparents, it is preparedness work with immediate, practical relevance.

A Continuing Role in National Trauma Care

Johannigman’s influence reaches beyond Cincinnati. He has served on the American College of Surgeons’ Committee on Trauma, including as a state trauma chair and region chief, mentoring surgeons and helping shape how trauma care is delivered across a wider footprint. Earlier in his career, he helped West Chester Hospital earn verified Level III trauma center status, expanding advanced trauma care for families north of the city.

His military service earned him the Bronze Star and the Legion of Merit, among other honors. But the work that occupies him now carries no medals and little visibility. It happens in training rooms, planning meetings, and joint exercises, the unglamorous groundwork that, in his view, is exactly what saves lives when a community is tested.

For a surgeon who spent much of his life leaving Cincinnati to serve elsewhere, the mission has finally come home. And this time, he intends to stay.