Anticipation grows for new emergency room facilities

Jace Radke

Tuesday, Sept. 19, 2000 | 11:41 a.m.

After spending a few hours helping to guide tours through the new 40,000-square-foot Sunrise Hospital and Medical Center emergency rooms on Monday, charge nurse Susan Weiler didn't want to go back to her station in the old ER.

"We just can't wait to get in here when it opens in October," Weiler said as she walked through the spacious new critical care area of the adult emergency room. "I was in the old ER a couple days ago and there was a person right behind me, and one to each side. We have a lot more room in here."

The new emergency facilities are more than three times the size of the Columbia/HCA Healthcare Corp. hospital's 11,000-square-foot emergency room currently in use, Director of Pediatric Emergency Services Dr. Michael Zbiegien said.

Due to open in October, the Sunrise expansion is not the only move to increase emergency services in the Las Vegas Valley. University Medical Center is scheduled to open a new $18.5 million emergency room in December. UMC's 52,000-square-foot expansion will include 51 emergency room beds, an intensive care unit and a critical care unit.

Sunrise's new emergency space will have a critical division, Zbiegien said. "In the old ER there is a blue line on the floor that separates the adult ER from the pediatrics ER. Here there's a long hallway and three sets of double doors between them, so we don't have a Friday night drunk swearing near a kid, or a crying kid bothering someone having chest pains."

The $17 million Sunrise emergency services department uses circular floor plans for easy patient access and better supervision of patients by nurses, ER pediatrics charge nurse Chris Maher said.

"We love this place because it gets very hectic in emergency situations, and in here the nursing staff can easily see everyone at once," Maher said. "Every bed is monitored and it should ease some of the stress we have to deal with."

The adult emergency room features 50 beds, compared with the old unit's 37, while the pediatric facility has 22 beds, compared with just eight in the old ER. All of the rooms are private, with telephones and televisions to help keep patients occupied while they wait for test results or are under observation, Director of Adult Emergency Services Alice Conroy said.

"We're gaining beds and adding the latest technology and more efficient designs, so I think we're addressing one of the pieces of the problem of overcrowded emergency rooms," Conroy said.

Zbiegien agrees, saying that everything in the new emergency facility is designed to help serve patients as quickly as possible.

"If we need a CAT (computer-axial tomography) scan it's only 10 big steps away instead of in another department," Zbiegien said. "We have triage rooms, and rooms with oxygen hookups where we can sit eight patients at a time and I can look at them one by one."

A 38,000-square-foot expansion including cardiology services and a 48-bed intensive care unit is proposed for the second floor of the emergency facilities building.

On the third floor a new heliport is already in place, allowing for easy patient access by helicopter, Sunrise Transport Coordinator Ken Thompson said.

"Before, we landed helicopters out in the parking lot, and that was a high risk that snarled traffic," Thompson said. "We had to get security out there to clear the area, and our specialty teams had to run all the way to the north end of the hospital. Now the helicopters will land and patients will take the elevator right to the emergency room or surgery."