Our Services
Emergency Department
A New Attitude
The accolades keep pouring in, and we can attribute most of those to the major transformation that occurred in our Emergency Department (ED) last year. Starting at the top, the leadership skills introduced by our ED medical director, Dr. Robert Rosen, and our ED director, Tiffany Bell, have not only helped increase staff morale, but have helped raise the satisfaction levels of our patients.
“Dr. Rosen and I approach the day-to-day operations of the ED together,” Tiffany explains. “We make sure we take the time to listen to what the staff has to say, and we aggressively address each issue. And both of us take time to listen to the patients and family members who want to communicate their concerns.”
A New Environment
We listen to the feedback provided by our patients, and recently we made numerous changes based on those comments. Improvements to the ED’s physical area include a relocated triage area; a new receiving area, registration desk and security desk; new trim, ceiling tiles, and a fresh coat of paint throughout the ED; plus new furniture and a flat-screen plasma TV for the waiting area. We also added five beds to our Fast Track, a new suture room, and a new orthopedics room.
Shorter Wait Times
One of the most common complaints heard in EDs across the country is the excessive amount of time it takes for a patient to be seen. Last year, we put several measures in place to help speed up that process. By increasing our ED staff, adding another physician provider during core hours, and completely digitizing our documentation procedures, we managed to shorten the average length of stay for our ED patients from 3.50 to 2.54 hours. (The national average is 4.22 hours.) This was not an easy task, considering the ED staff treated over 28,000 patients last year.
A New Program that Saves Lives
Because we’re a community hospital, we rely heavily on our partner, the University of Virginia (UVA), to treat patients with advanced medical conditions. We partnered with UVA on a program that helps regional hospitals more quickly diagnose and treat heart attack patients. Project UPSTART uses a carefully designed, systematic approach to reduce the amount of time between diagnosis and treatment for major heart attack patients who need advanced services, such as emergency angioplasty in a specialized lab.
“Project UPSTART is a standardized protocol,” Tiffany explains. “It is designed to get our patients with ST elevation myocardial infarction (STEMI) to UVA’s cath lab quicker. What this means is better survivability for those we are able to get to the lab within a 90-minute window. And when you have a standardized protocol in place in a hospital department, such as the ED, it makes things go faster, it reduces the chances of error, and it ensures standard practice.”