City Hospitals Reinvent Role of Emergency - New York

The city is taking the business of emergency rooms very seriously, even to serving lunch and offering many other amenities to those waiting...and separating the urgent from non urgent care to ensure those who need emergency care get served as quickly as possible...BD

But now hospitals — public and private, large and small — are spending hundreds of millions of dollars renovating, rebuilding and expanding their emergency rooms. They are dividing them into treatment areas for the sickest patients with the most dire injuries and using quieter corners for the growing number of patients using emergency rooms for routine medical care.

And the city’s public hospital system is projecting that it will have spent m ore than $100 million by 2011 to upgrade emergency rooms at six of its 11 hospitals. Other hospitals across the nation, sustaining big losses in their emergency rooms and depleting their charity care funding for the uninsured, have shut down their emergency rooms or even closed completely.

The fast-track systems divide emergency rooms into areas for patients with minor injuries for those with more acute problems, so that someone with a sprained ankle is not lumped together with a patient who is bleeding profusely from the head. Montefiore may not feel much like a five-star hotel, but patients there said they were pleasantly surprised by some of the new services, which include a child care specialist who plays with the children, handing out stickers, apple juice, Teddy Grahams, Play-Doh and coloring books.