It’s less of an emergency

Kris Hill

Friday, Feb. 23, 2001 | 10:53 a.m.

Crowded emergency rooms at University Medical Center hold six gurneys in a room, separated by just a couple of feet and a curtain. There's barely enough space for the patient and doctor. Family members have to move out of the way when nurses come in.

That changed Wednesday when the hospital's new 52,000-square-foot, two-story ER and intensive care unit opened. It is housed in a new wing between the trauma center and the main hospital.

Hospital staff believe the new facility will help ease the crowded conditions of the ER and better facilitate patient care, UMC spokesman Rick Plummer said.

In the past few months UMC's emergency room has frequently been on divert status, which means that ambulances are asked to take patients to another hospital if that's possible.

But the ill and injured still show up. Some would-be patients find themselves waiting as long as 12 hours for treatment.

The new ER has 51 beds -- 12 more than the old one -- and six separate nurse's stations and treatment areas, including an area where psychiatric patients and prisoners will be treated away from the rest of the patients.

"That way you don't have a mom giving birth next to a prisoner," Plummer said.

The expanded space isn't limited to the inside of the facility.

The old ambulance bay barely had room for one aid car to park, but there are 10 parking spaces for ambulances outside the new ER.

And patients in the new ICU will have private rooms, whereas before there were three or four people in what the unit's manager, Nurse Patti McCoy, described as "multi-patient wards."

The new ICU, on the second floor of the new wing, has 36 beds.

McCoy, who has worked in the ICU for 19 years, is thrilled about the new facility.

"It's a once-in-a-lifetime thing to open up a brand new ICU," she said.

The cost of the new facility was $18.5 million, which included $5 million for a collection of new, cutting-edge equipment such as an automated medicine-dispensing system and a computer-based patient's chart system.

Each year about 65,000 adults are treated at UMC. Children are treated in the pediatric ER, which is separate from the adult emergency center.

Funding came from the Clark County Commission, and construction began last spring.

The opening was celebrated Wednesday night at a ceremonial grand opening, the first event in the hospital's celebration of its 70th anniversary.

UMC's new facility comes after Sunrise Hospital and Medical Center's $17 million, 40,000-square-foot emergency room opened last fall.