By Richard A. Webster
The CityBusiness North Shore Report
NORTH OAKS, La. — The North Shore’s overcrowded emergency rooms are hoping to get some relief from a new statewide response system, designed to decrease ER wait times and ensure critical patients are delivered to the hospital best suited to treat their injuries.
The state instituted the Louisiana Emergency Response Network in June.
LERN is most needed on the North Shore, where post-Katrina population surges have hit emergency rooms especially hard, says Dr. Jay Smith, emergency services medical director for North Oaks Medical Center in Hammond and chairman of LERN’s Region 9, which includes the North Shore.
“Not only do we have more people, but the population is getting older and older,” Smith says. “Elderly people have more chronic medical conditions and acute needs for emergency care, so they take up more space for a longer period of time and require more resources. “
North Oaks’ emergency room was built a decade ago to handle 40,000 patients a year. It hit 60,000 before Katrina and is now seeing 73,000 patients annually.
St. Tammany Parish Hospital’s emergency department averaged 50 patients a day in 2003 compared with 100 a day in 2008. In 2005, its ER treated 29,000 patients compared with 34,000 last year.
A planned $200 million expansion would have created additional room for emergency care at North Oaks, but the recession put those plans on indefinite hold.
To help alleviate the strain on their ERs, both hospitals added physicians and nurses to move patients through the system quicker and instituted a point-of-care testing system where common types of lab work are done bedside instead of waiting until the doctor sees the patient.
North Oaks also created an eight-bed holding unit to free up additional space and expanded the hours of its walk-in clinic so nonurgent patients don’t have to rely on the emergency room.
St. Tammany Parish Hospital added a six-bed minor care unit to handle people with less severe injuries.
While those improvements helped, officials say they could not alone solve the problem of increased demand and limited capacity.
That’s where the LERN system comes in.
Before its implementation, paramedics would transport critical care patients to the nearest hospital. The problem on the North Shore is that services such as orthopedic, neurological and general surgery are not available at all times, says Wade Fournier, the nurse manager for emergency services at St. Tammany Parish Hospital.
If a patient involved in a car accident fractures his femur, it wouldn’t do any good to take him to the nearest hospital if that hospital doesn’t have an orthopedic surgeon available, Fournier says.
But with the LERN system, paramedics can call in and get real-time information on what services are immediately available at hospitals in a specific region.
“It may not be the closest hospital, but it will have the needed specialty,” Smith says. “You don’t want patients going to hospitals where they don’t have the capability of treating them. If that happens, you have to go through the long laborious process of transferring the patient somewhere else. The goal is to get them to the most appropriate place as fast as possible without delays. “
LERN divides Louisiana into nine regions, and each region has a computer system that tracks what services are available at each hospital. Region 9 includes St. Tammany, Tangipahoa, Washington and St. Helena parishes.
In Lacombe, the Louisiana Medical Center and Heart Hospital recently underwent a $40 million expansion that increased its emergency room capacity from 10 to 20 beds, making it the largest emergency room on the North Shore.
Before the LERN system, paramedics who picked up a patient near Hammond would have instinctively taken him to the nearest hospital, North Oaks, even though it didn’t have the needed specialist on hand, says Heart Hospital spokeswoman Ann Barks. Now they can make an informed decision on where to transport the patient using LERN even if it means driving several miles farther to Lacombe.
“People in Slidell and Covington are used to going to the closest hospital in an emergency,” Barks says. “But if they go to those, they may wait longer to get care than if they drove a little further to the middle of the parish.”
Copyright 2009 Dolan Media Newswires