You are cordially invited to the
Ground Breaking Ceremony
For the Olive View UCLA Medical Center
Emergency Services Expansion
and
Acute Care Unit Project
Thursday, April 16, 2009
10:00 am
Olive View-UCLA Medical Center
14445 Olive View Drive
Sylmar, Ca. 91342
(the corner of Kennedy & Saranac, inside the construction site)
RSVP to Gail Hewes at (818) 364-3001
By no later than Monday, April 13, 2009
Olive View-UCLA Medical Center
Emergency Room/Acute Care Unit Construction Project Ground-breaking
Background Information
Background
§ The Olive View-UCLA Medical Center emergency room presently provides about 42,000 emergency and 19,000 urgent care visits annually.
§ The current emergency room is 15,000 square feet in size and has a total of 30 treatment beds (15 treatment bays, seven urgent treatment areas, and eight observation beds). Only one of the current treatment rooms is built to care for patients with an infectious disease (e.g., isolation room).
§ The emergency room was originally built with seven treatment bays, but increased demand over the years has required the doubling up of patients in the treatment areas.
§ This doubling up of patients presents a number of challenges. The very limited treatment space impacts the flow and efficiency of patient treatment and also poses challenges to protecting patient privacy in such cramped quarters.
§ The emergency room does not presently have an area dedicated to pediatric care, which forces staff to move patients around to accommodate these children.
§ The layout of the current emergency room, which made up of three separate areas, makes the integration of the various levels of care difficult, due to the distance between the treatment areas.
§ The needs assessment conducted prior to the design of the new building concluded that the shortcomings of the current emergency room include: insufficient general treatment space; lack of adequate space for urgent care; inadequate isolation space for patients with infectious disease; insufficient space for ambulance drop-off; insufficient workspace for staff charting and documentation; and inadequate space in the waiting areas.
§ The number of hospital emergency room closures throughout Los Angeles County over the past decade (11 hospitals have either closed their emergency room or closed entirely in the past five years) has resulted in increased volume to the Olive View emergency room.
§ The number of people without health insurance continues to increase. The primary access point to care for these people is through the emergency room and this has resulted in not only more people seeking care at the Olive View emergency room, but also greater complexity in the type of care required.
New Building
§ The new emergency room will be almost 32,000 square feet and will have 51 treatment areas, which include:
o Sixteen adult critical care rooms
o Six treatment room specifically for pediatric patients
o Five obstetric-gynecological exam rooms
o Six isolation (negative pressure) rooms for treating patients with infectious diseases
o Seven observation bays
o Nine urgent care treatment rooms
o Two procedure rooms
§ Consistent with industry standards, the new emergency room will include a radiological suite that includes x-ray and CT technology, so patients with emergent conditions do not have to be transported across the hospital to receive critical diagnostic tests; thus improving the timeliness of the tests and patient safety.
§ It will also include dedicated space for patient registration and financial screening; this function is presently conducted outside the emergency room.
§ The new emergency room will double the current emergency treatment capacity at Olive View. The increased size, more efficient design, and improved technology of the building will greatly improve the efficiency and patient flow of the emergency room.
Acute Care/Isolation Unit
§ In the wake of the anthrax scares that occurred earlier this decade, Los Angeles County was identified as having insufficient isolation capacity in the event of a potential bioterrorism event. As part of its federal bioterrorism grant submission, the Department of Public Health included the creation of additional isolation capacity as one of its goals.
§ The unit will be used to treat inpatient tuberculosis patients from throughout the DHS hospitals, so as to provide relief on the isolation room capacity of these facilities. It is estimated that at any given time there are on average 10 such patients in DHS hospitals.
§ The acute care unit will be 11,000 square feet and will house 15 two-person inpatient isolation rooms (e.g., up to 30 patients).
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment