• An Anton Media Group Special •
HEALTHY LIVING JULY 8 - 14, 2015
Free Standing Emergency Rooms On a recent trip to Texas, while driving on the interstate, I kept seeing neon signs flashing times, “seven minutes to be seen in our emergency room.” Another mile down the road was another sign, “five minutes to ER care.” As I turned down the street, past a drive-through McDonald’s, there was a strip mall with a Quick Lube ten-minute oil change, a drivethrough Starbucks and next door was a stand-alone emergency room. That’s right, an emergency room with no hospital attached to it. Everywhere you go in Texas, these are popping up all over and oftentimes right across the street from urgent care centers. Free standing emergency rooms have been in Texas for almost a decade, with the assistance of state legislation which facilitated their growth. Long Island is now opening its first free-standing Emergency Room on July 1 in Long Beach, which will be affiliated with South Nassau
THE HEART OF THE COMMUNITY
CYNTHIA PAULIS Communities Hospital. Long Island has been in need of these facilities for a very long time and with the closing of many hospitals on the South Shore, some for financial reasons and some because of Superstorm Sandy, many residents are forced to be transported to the North Shore for care, which is not only inconvenient but inefficient. In cardiac and stroke cases, where every minute counts, these facilities can actually be lifesaving. (Full disclosure, I am board certified in emergency medicine with over 20 years’ experience and I have worked in urgent care
centers, emergency rooms both in New York and Texas, and free-standing emergency rooms. Plus I was a medical director of a trauma center so I understand how these work.) A free-standing emergency room is a fully-equipped facility staffed by an experienced board certified emergency room physician, a nurse and two techs. They have their own lab, which can turn around results faster than the medical shows, plus their own CAT scan on premises as well as digital X-ray and ultrasound and X-ray reports that are read by a radiologist off-site within 30 minutes via teleradiology.
Pros The advantage of a free-standing emergency room is the speed at which a patient can be seen compared with a regular emergency room. Oftentimes in a regular emergency room there is a lag time between registration, being brought back to a bed, waiting for labs
to be drawn and the results, waiting for X-rays to be taken and read and, finally, waiting for a disposition. It is not unusual for someone on a good weekend night to wait up to eight hours from start to finish for the process. (Bring a good book like War and Peace when sitting in an emergency room.) This is where the free-standings excel because they are not logjammed with hospital patients taking up ER beds while waiting to be seen by the attending or sent up to a room. In a free-standing ER a patient can be seen, have labs drawn, X-rays taken, plus all results done and a diagnosis made within an hour. If the person needs to be admitted to a hospital, a call is made to the nearby hospital and the patient will be transferred by ambulance, which is on a contract basis with the facility, and transferred. But here is the best part. The patient does not go to the ER of
see ER on page 17A
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