More ERs are not the only answer to local healthcare
Last month, Baptist Hospital uptown (now owned by Ochsner) reopened its Emergency Room, giving uptown residents more convenient access to emergency healthcare. The openning has since been praised as another step towards recovery, since access to healthcare in New Orleans has been limited since Katrina. However, a story published in the Times-Picayune sheds light on what the community still lacks, even as more medical facilities reopen.
Ochsner's Baptist Hospital in Uptown New Orleans
Pulse strengthens on ER services
But Baptist ER called ‘drop in the bucket’Sunday, January 11, 2009By Bill BarrowStaff writerThe New Orleans region’s emergency medical services and other hospital capacity will expand Monday with the opening of new facilities at Ochsner Baptist Medical Center in Uptown.
Ochsner Health System executives and some residents around the hospital praised in particular the opening of an emergency department, part of $12 million in improvements to the campus that housed Memorial Medical Center before Hurricane Katrina struck in 2005.
The department will have two trauma rooms, nine exam rooms and one triage room. The upgrade also includes a wing with 43 private rooms and an expansion of the hospital’s intensive care unit from three to 12 beds.
Still, some medical professionals say the state of the Orleans Parish health care infrastructure, which was devastated by Katrina, demands a cautious reaction. They laud Ochsner’s investment but bemoan the dearth of other services that reach beyond a cursory measure of emergency capacity at local hospitals.
“Will Baptist help? Absolutely. It’s strategically located” at Napoleon and Claiborne avenues, said Dr. Juliette Saussy, director of Emergency Medical Services for the city of New Orleans.
“But it’s a drop in the bucket. . . . I think it will be overrun very quickly,” Saussy said, explaining that she routinely sees ambulances wait several hours at emergency departments in the city.
Later in the article, Dr. Karen DeSalvo, of the Tulane University Community Health Center (TUCHC), emphasizes the city’s need for primary care facilities, a need that the TUCHC at Covenant House has been responding to since it opened in the months immediately following Katrina. AVODAH Corps Member Jenna Pollock has been working with Dr. DeSalvo this year on building a more community-based approach to healthcare.
And Dr. Karen DeSalvo, a Tulane University physician and health-care policy expert, attributed emergency waits to many of the same factors that Saussy cited. But she said upping hospital capacity in the short term is not the best answer.
“The underpinning of all of this is our history of a heavy reliance on emergency rooms as the first line of care,” she said.
Ambulances would not have to wait at emergency rooms that were not full of patients better served in other ways, DeSalvo said.
— Right-sized? —
Those sentiments echo in part the findings of a 2006 Pricewaterhouse Coopers report that New Orleans hospital infrastructure was overbuilt before the storm and was right-sized by closures.
Considering research that medical consumers use whatever is available to them — something akin to “if you build it, they will come” — DeSalvo said New Orleans should prioritize recovery investment in primary care and prevention rather than enable old patterns that have yielded bad health outcomes for patients.
“Every part of the system is necessary,” she said. “But what we have to pay attention to is how we invest in the right components . . . because emergency care is among the most expensive forms of care.”
Read the full article on the Times-Picayune website by clicking here.
Entries (RSS)
Chad said:
Loved the information here I’ll have this bookmarked and will be back to read more.