UCSF Medical Center recently opened 18 new patient beds -- most in private rooms -- in the Emergency Department (ED) as part of a major renovation.
The new rooms replace the former bays or large areas of beds.
The renovated area includes two large resuscitation rooms for the most critical patients, four "step-down" rooms for emergent-care patients, a room for obstetrics and gynecology patients and three rooms for children, according to Dale Borgeson, business and information systems manager for the ED.
The opening marks the completion of the third phase of a four-phase $10 million ED renovation project. Construction began in July 2003 after three years of planning. The first phase included a new waiting room, triage area and temporary bed space. The second phase included 11 beds in nine rooms for orthopedics, psychiatric, infection control and "fast-track" patients.
The renovation has the same number of beds and about the same square footage as before, but is configured more efficiently with rooms inside and around a central "racetrack" corridor, Borgeson says. All rooms are equipped for central monitoring.
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| Brian Vansacker, an emergency room technician, shows off one of the newly remodeled rooms in the emergency department. Photo by Christine Jegan. |
The final phase of the project, the completion of the new administrative area, is due to be completed by mid-August followed by two additional projects -- 10 "observation" beds for patients too sick to be sent home but not appropriate for hospital admission -- in November and a new computerized tomography (CT) scanner adjacent to the ED in December. Emergency patients receive about 6,000 CT scans annually so it is much more efficient to have a scanner on-site than to take emergency patients to the CT scanner elsewhere in the hospital.
The new facilities should allow faster treatment and processing of the 40,000 patients who visit the ED annually, Borgeson says. The ED staff also works with hospital-wide staff to improve patient flow.
