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January 13, 2004 Record-Eagle/Meegan M. Reid Rich Faller, M.D., fellow doctors and nurses scurry around the nurses station at the Emergency Room at Munson Medical Center. Munson bumping up E.R. capacity$500,000 gift will help expand current facilityByRecord-Eagle staff writer TRAVERSE CITY - Some patients are examined in the hallway of the area's largest emergency room, the regional trauma referral center for northwest Michigan. Munson Medical Center's emergency room handles 40,000 patients annually, twice what it was designed to accommodate. The hospital recently announced that Helen Rollert-Riordan of Traverse City made a $500,000 gift, which will be used as part of a $24 million emergency room expansion. The gift is in honor of her late husband, Edward D. Rollert, who died in 1969. Sunday night eight level one trauma patients, the most seriously injured, showed up almost simultaneously. Seven surgeons were called in, plus extra nurses and technicians in addition to the general mix of patients. It was so busy a jet had to be brought in from Pittsburgh to transport a patient to Ann Arbor. All local North Flight aircraft were occupied. "The crowding, it made the program 'ER' look like small potatoes," said Kathleen McManus, a Munson spokeswoman. Despite two remodels and the addition of two treatment rooms over the past decade, Munson still uses beds permanently stationed in the halls. "We have a very good medical staff and that's been the key to maintaining our level of care," said Mark Baranski, director of emergency services. With the closing of hospitals and emergency rooms, ER crowding has become a top national issue for hospitals, Baranski said. Until 1995, Traverse City had two emergency rooms. Three years from now, the elbow rubbing should end. The needs have been assessed, an architect has been hired, and Munson is now in the process of designing an ER that will, with an exterior shell, allow the ER to triple its current size. The hospital will build the new facility next to the current emergency room. It will provide more space, more storage, more privacy for patients and better observation for staff. It will have more radiology equipment, so trauma patients won't have to leave the emergency room. The registration desk for walk-in patients will be gone, replaced by a triage room and bed-side registration.
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