Northeast Georgia Medical Center celebrated its new trauma care designation Monday with ceremonial speeches, including one by Gov. Nathan Deal, and the unveiling of a new sign at the emergency entrance. “To all of you who are part of the team that made this possible, I want to say thank you,” Deal told a couple hundred people gathered for the ceremony at the hospital at 743 Spring St. He said his executive order last month allowing rural hospitals to scale back operations to stay afloat financially “will put even more obligations on larger facilities” such as NGMC. “I hope we are all very conscious of how important a tremendously qualified medical facility is to not only this local community, but to this entire region of Georgia and, in many respects, to our state as a whole,” Deal said.