Renovation increases efficiency

Each year nearly half of Children's Memorial Hospital's inpatients are admitted through the Emergency Department (ED). To keep up with the demand for services and continue to improve efficiency, the department is undergoing a $600,000 renovation.

The project will help emergency physicians, nurses and other medical staff to continue to improve patient care, allowing them to more quickly assess patients, decrease wait times and improve their ability to respond to emergency situations. Components of the project include additional patient triage rooms, a new space for patient registration, waiting room improvements, the creation of separate patient rooms for psychiatric consultations, a new staff lounge and new patient restrooms.

Reconfiguring the facility was essential, because the volume of patients visiting the ED had grown 35 percent over the last six years. According to Steven Krug, MD, head, Division of Emergency Medicine, the hospital's ED had 40,000 patient visits in 2000. He predicts it will exceed 54,000 by the end of 2006.

One of the keys to the renovation is the expansion of the triage area, the location where the staff prioritizes patients by the seriousness of their illness or injury, and then provides them with the most appropriate treatment as quickly as possible. Currently, the ED has just one triage room. During the busiest times, nurses have to assess as many as three patients simultaneously in that one space. Emergency Department Director Cathleen Shanahan, RN, BSN, MS, says at peak periods the ED sees more than 250 patients a day.

“With three triage rooms, we'll know sooner which kids require the most immediate care,” says Shanahan. “We'll also get a better picture of how busy the whole department is so that we can effectively manage our time to address the needs of patients and families.”

The additional psychiatry consultation rooms are necessary, says Krug, because the evaluation time for these typically complicated consultations tends to be much longer than for most medical evaluations.

“Parallel to national statistics, we've seen a dramatic increase in the number of kids in our ED who require acute psychiatric evaluations,” he says. “We used to see only one or two kids a week with these problems. Now it's not unusual to have three or more kids a night that require this type of attention.”

A sorely needed and expanded lounge for the department's more than 100 fulltime employees has already been constructed, which provides an important space for ED workers to decompress or process the challenges of caring for seriously ill or injured children in an emergency setting.

Another new addition is likely to be a popular one: a video game “playroom” area in the waiting room, with an assortment of age appropriate video and computer game stations.

“We've considered these changes very thoughtfully to maximize the use of our space,” says Krug of the department's redesign. “These changes will promote patient safety and continue to make our ED remarkably efficient, while remaining patient and family centered.”

The multi-stage renovation project is scheduled for completion by the end of 2006 and is supported by a $100,000 gift from the Barker Welfare Foundation.