Growth overloads Las Vegas hospitals

Stacy J. Willis

Friday, Aug. 11, 2000 | 11:09 a.m.

Clark County hospitals are facing a shortage of critical care and emergency room beds, primarily caused by population growth.

Ambulances in the Las Vegas area are on "divert status," meaning that in some cases they must pass overcrowded hospitals and deliver patients to less crowded facilities, according to Clark County Health District officials.

Some of the county's hospitals are canceling elective surgeries and postponing procedures such as scheduled Caesarean section births.

However, the overcrowding is not caused by a health epidemic, said Dr. Donald Kwalick, the county's chief health officer.

"The biggest part of the problem is that a lot of people are going to the emergency rooms for nonemergency situations," Kwalick said. "People have to understand that the emergency room is not for primary care."

About 1.4 million Clark County residents are served by eight hospitals. The county population is growing at a rate of 5.6 percent this year.

At MountainView Hospital in the northwest Las Vegas Valley, the average wait this week for an emergency-room patient was four hours.

"I've never seen anything like it," said Mark Howard, MountainView CEO. "It's been a problem all summer, but we thought it would taper off. It hasn't -- and we're not even in the busiest part of the year -- the winter flu season."

Howard said that many of the valley's new residents have not yet developed a relationship with a primary care physician and are turning to the emergency room in nonemergency situations. Some patients complain that their insurance plans give them a limited selection of primary care physicians, and those physicians' appointments are booked.

At emergency rooms, however, patients are not served on a first-come, first-serve basis. Instead, they are served based on the immediacy of their health needs. That means some less-critically ill patients may wait as long as six hours for care.

At Sunrise Hospital and Medical Center in central Las Vegas, the emergency room treated between 225 and 250 patients each day this week, Ann Lynch, director of communications, said.

"It's three main things," Lynch said. "The increase in population, the lack of relationships with primary care physicians and then the heat. A lot of people are going out there and playing a set of tennis in this heat, underestimating its effect."

At several points this week, Howard said, American Medical Response ambulances were forced to rotate between the eight hospitals regardless of their proximity.

"That means that someone in a car accident on Warm Springs Road in Henderson might be brought all the way to MountainView (near U.S. 95 and Vegas Drive) if it was MountainView's turn," Howard said.

But, he said, exceptions are made for trauma patients in critical condition, who are always taken to the closest hospital.

In addition to the emergency rooms, the hospitals themselves are filling up, and in some cases are full.

All of MountainView's 120 beds are in use. Additionally, 18 people were admitted to the hospital Thursday and were forced to wait in the emergency room.

Some relief may be just around the corner. MountainView is scheduled to open a new wing that will have 72 beds on Sept. 7. Sunrise Hospital is scheduled to open a new emergency room facility in October that will be twice the size of the current facility.

St. Rose Dominican Hospital in Henderson recently opened a new site, the Sienna Campus, which was expected to alleviate some of the summer's overcrowding problems. The new branch added 28 emergency room beds to the hospital's existing 21 beds.

"But we're already experiencing higher volumes of people than we expected at that campus," Shauna Walch, St. Rose spokeswoman said.

Kwalick said he plans to meet with administrators from the valley's hospitals next week to develop a plan to relieve overcrowding.

Residents are urged by the Health District to go to urgent care and family physicians for ailments including lacerations that may require stitches, sprains, urinary tract infections, upper respiratory infections, ear infections, insect bites, rashes, sore throats, diarrhea, coughs and congestion.