Emergency Department at St. Luke’s Plans Improvements

All week long, you’ve been fighting a congested cough but it just keeps getting worse. Now you have a fever. You know you need to see a doctor, but his office is closed today.

You wrenched your neck a couple of days ago and now you can’t turn your head to the right at all. You know you should see your own doctor, but you cannot get an appointment.

Where do You Go?
If you live in New Bedford or one of its surrounding towns, you have only one choice that is always there, 24 hours a day and seven days a week— the St. Luke’s Hospital Emergency Department (ED). But you know the wait will be long and you wonder why it has to be that way. The answers are many.

St. Luke’s ED sees almost 73,000 patients each year — one of the busiest community emergency departments in Massachusetts. Built to serve only 55,000 patients annually, the facility is often overloaded. Patients can be lined up in hallways and wheeled in and out of rooms for treatment.

Emergency departments are the only healthcare sites required by law to care for all arrivals. And as a not-for-profit community hospital, it is part of St. Luke’s mission to do so.

“The problem of overcrowding at the ED is not going away, so Southcoast is taking steps to improve emergency services for New Bedford,” said Linda Bodenmann, Chief Operating Officer and Chief Financial Officer for Southcoast Health System.

The emergency departments at all three Southcoast hospitals — St. Luke’s, Charlton Memorial in Fall River and Tobey in Wareham — have undertaken extensive performance improvement measures over the past several years to reduce the amount of time a patient spends in the department.

Charlton developed new processes and restructured patient flow to dramatically reduce treatment times under most circumstances. These changes include the creation of ExpressCare 24 @ Charlton, which separates the simple injuries and health issues — such as flu, sprains and suture removals — from the critical and more serious patients who visit the ED. Bedside registration with wireless laptops on wheels also speeds things along.

Tobey’s ED works to keep patients moving in a continuous forward motion from “quick registration,” to triage, to a room for treatment. Quick registration lets physicians order tests faster. Full registration is completed while test results are on their way.

St. Luke’s Hospital has created a similar process that will soon be complimented by a new, more efficient design. St. Luke’s new ED will include 51 new treatment bays (up from 31), an ExpressCare 24 section similar to Charlton’s and a secure area for criminal and drug-related admissions. The plan also includes the addition of 32 new hospital rooms, which will allow ED patients — who need to be admitted — to get to rooms more quickly and patients waiting in the ED to be seen more rapidly.

“There will be times, at all of our EDs, when we are backed up with multiple traumas, but we will continue to explore ways to improve the patient experience,” Bodenmann said. “Our plans for St. Luke’s will increase accessibility while continuing to provide high-quality care in the safest, most efficient setting possible.”

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