Construction begins at St. Francis
Paul Shandley, manager of imaging services at SSM Health St. Francis Hospital, swings a sledgehammer toward a sheetrock wall Wednesday afternoon during a “wall-breaking ceremony” kicking off construction of what will be an enlarged emergency treatment center. The project also embraces relocation of the St. Francis gift shop and registration desk.
SSM Health St. Francis Hospital President Mike Baumgartner presided over what he called a “different kind of groundbreaking” Wednesday afternoon as a group of staffers donned hardhats, picked up sledgehammers, and pounded holes in the wall of what used to a lounge area just inside one of hospital’s east entrances.
The “wall-breaking” ceremony marked the official start of construction for a $1.7 million project that will add space to the existing emergency treatment center while providing patients there with considerably more privacy.
“It’s all about the patients,” Baumgartner said just before the hammers thudded and the sheetrock flew. “It really is all about improving the care we provide for our patients.”
Baumgartner joked that the wall to be destroyed was marked with colored tape similar to the way patients are marked before surgery so that physicians will know who and what to operate on.
“We don’t want to tear up anything we’re not supposed to tear up,” he said.
When the renovation project is complete, the former lounge area located to the south of the hospital’s main entrance will contain a relocated St. Francis gift shop. The existing registration area will then move across the hall into the space occupied by the current gift shop.
That will allow for expansion of the emergency department.
Currently the emergency department has one private room with permanent walls. The other patient areas are equipped with gurneys and separated by curtains. In total, there are three rooms containing five treatment areas.
After the remodel, there will be seven enclosed ED rooms in all, and a triage room will be available for overflow if no one is being treated there.
Half the current waiting room will become the triage room, and the operators’ room will be turned into new trauma rooms and a patient room.
In addition to providing more privacy for emergency patients, hospital spokesperson Rita Miller said the registration area will be configured for greater confidentiality as well.
Besides improvements to the emergency department, new construction at St. Francis will create a joint waiting area for the laboratory and imaging departments along with private registration rooms and easier access to the anticoagulation clinic.
The emergency department expansion project began moving forward three years ago when St. Francis administrators informed SSM Health corporate officers that the hospital’s emergency department deserved an upgrade. A layout was submitted and revised several times before the project earned approval last spring.
“All the nurses and technicians in the ER helped with redraws,” ED manager Pat Giffin said in November after the project was announced.
According Giffin, the impetus to expand the emergency treatment area was twofold. First, she said, hospital staff was concerned about meeting increased patient volume.
In order to prove the renovation was needed, Giffin said, the department culled data from the last two years to find how many days the emergency department had more patients than rooms. At that point, the facility was overcrowded 50 percent of the time.
Since then, the emergency department has served its highest number of patients. In September, the ER was overcrowded 60 percent of the time.
Giffin attributed the influx of patients to several factors. She said rising population accounted for some of the increase. Other variables include changes in insurance and problems with scheduling appointments with primary care physicians.
Giffin said that besides adding beds, the emergency department discovered it needed to consider the patient experience.
“More and more healthcare is going to privacy concerns,” Giffin said. “It used to be that all hospitals had two beds in a room, three beds in some rooms. But now hospitals are going to all private rooms for patient privacy. The ER needs to follow, and a lot of ERs are already private.”
Patient satisfaction surveys at St. Francis reveal that the hospital’s clientele favor this trend.
“Right now our staff do all they can because they know our patients want that privacy and they can’t give it fully to them,” Giffin said, “so they try to keep voices low and separate patients as much as we can. When we’re trying to run seven patients out of five rooms, that’s not possible.”
