University Hospital to do emergency care
By Kate Moran
Times-Picayune (New Orleans)
Copyright 2007 The Times-Picayune Publishing Company
New Orleans — After operating a temporary trauma unit in Elmwood for almost a year, Louisiana State University will again begin treating patients with gunshot wounds and other grievous injuries in downtown New Orleans starting this morning.
Trauma care was the signature service at Charity Hospital until Hurricane Katrina damaged the monumental building and forced its operator, LSU, to open a temporary trauma center in the suburbs. LSU has decided not to reopen Charity and is reviving the trauma unit at its other downtown location, University Hospital on Perdido Street.
“The return of the trauma center is one more building block in the provision of comprehensive health care to the greater New Orleans area,” Dr. Michael Butler, chief medical officer for LSU’s health care services division, said in a prepared statement.
The interim trauma center on South Clearview Parkway in Elmwood will close today, and LSU will move the 26 surgery beds and 10 intensive care beds to a renovated space on the first floor of University Hospital. Doctors will begin seeing trauma patients there at 7 a.m.
Before the storm, Charity doctors ran the only Level 1 trauma unit in the region, a top-level designation given to emergency rooms with a certain number of surgeons and specialists available 24 hours a day. Dr. Cathi Fontenot, University Hospital’s chief medical officer, said the new trauma center would have the same resources that Charity did but would not be eligible for the Level 1 rating for about a year.
“Certification is a process that occurs only after a group comes down from the American College of Surgeons to visit the facility, and they usually like to have eight to 12 months of data to review,” she said.
The addition of the trauma center significantly boosts the size of University Hospital, which sustained damage during the storm and reopened in November with 85 beds. Doctors from LSU and Tulane University, which helps run the hospital, have steadily added services since then.
Just last week, the two universities reopened 14 labor and delivery beds and 34 inpatient beds, according to Gail Gibson, associate nursing administrator for women’s services. She said she expects the unit to deliver about 1,500 babies this year and 3,000 in subsequent years if displaced residents continue returning to the city.
University Hospital should continue expanding in the next year to about 340 beds, far short of the 575 beds available before the storm. LSU plans to curtail growth there because it hopes to build a new teaching hospital downtown in collaboration with the U.S. Veterans Affairs Department. When that occurs, University Hospital would close.
Quicker trauma care
For now, the relocation of the trauma center to University Hospital means that accident and crime victims with dire injuries will not have to travel outside the city for care.
Dr. Jullette Saussy, director of emergency medical services in New Orleans, said her department had “a lot of angst” about the travel time to Elmwood when the temporary unit opened there last April. She said her staff developed a strict protocol to limit the type of patients who could be taken there so that those in grave condition would be cared for immediately.
With the trauma center now back in the city, Saussy said, “We hope we’ll be able to broaden our criteria for who gets taken to trauma center.”
LSU had been leasing space for the temporary trauma center in Elmwood from Ochsner Health System for $240,000 a month. Now that the trauma unit is gone, Ochsner plans to open additional outpatient beds and skilled-nursing beds at the site.