Bristol Regional Medical Center Opens New ER Department

By Mac McLean
Reporter / Bristol Herald Courier
Published: June 26, 2008

BRISTOL, Tenn. – Radio dispatchers guiding ambulances to Bristol Regional Medical Center will move into an office with windows so they’ll be able to see the vehicles arrive and unload patients.
They now work from a cramped room at the end of a hallway where their only view of the outside comes over closed-circuit cameras.

Medical Director Mark Woodard said the new dispatch room location, at the ER entrance, is one of the many ways the hospital’s new $13 million emergency room facility – to be unveiled today – better uses space than the old ER.

“We spent at least a year just planning where everything was going to go,” Woodard said Tuesday.

Hospital officials will cut a ribbon at 10:30 a.m. today to herald the new ER, which passed final inspection this week and will open for patients at 6 a.m. Monday.

Woodard said while the new ER only has 13 more beds – 44 beds rather than 31 in the current ER – it will have three times the square footage.

The extra space and layout will make a significant difference in helping the 68,000 patients who are expected to come through the ER this year, he said.

Bristol Regional’s current emergency room dates back to 1994 when the hospital was only seeing about half the patients it does now. Hospital officials converted lounges, break rooms and even closets into patient rooms as they struggled to keep up with the patient load.

Woodard said the flurry of space conversion meant every room ended up having a different design, interfering with patient care.

Rooms in the new ER are identical in layout.

Sinks and cabinets sit between the door and bed so doctors can reach instruments without having to walk across the room or dodge family members.

Every room features its own set of patient monitors for use on the most seriously ill patients or minor ailments.

The rooms also have long windowed walls so nurses who work from stations at the center of the facility can see inside.

“This is so much a nicer place to work,” Woodard said, adding the new layout brings some control to an emergency room’s normally chaotic environment.

Bristol Regional President and Chief Executive Officer Bart Hove said hospital officials started thinking about redoing the ER layout in 2004. They received a state certificate of need in early 2006 and started building the facility in December.

“We’ve looked forward [to our ribbon cutting] during the 18 months that we were under construction,” Hove said.

About 60 percent of patients admitted to Bristol Regional come through its emergency room, he said. The facility will maintain its Level II Trauma designation – the second-highest criteria an emergency room can get – and will continue to be the state’s sixth-largest ER.

Work on the facility is far from complete, however. The hospital plans to convert its current ER into patient rooms and a new waiting room over the next several months.

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