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January 27, 2005New E.R. to alleviate space issuesNew facility will cost $6.3 millionByRecord-Eagle staff writer  Record-Eagle/Sheri McWhirter Nurses Lisa Meyer and Nicole Owens begin assessing a woman's condition as soon as she is brought to the emergency room with chest pains. The nurses station is only a few feet away from the curtain area where the woman was treated. Emergency medical workers bring in patients who have chest pains, injuries from car and snowmobile accidents, or other maladies. Doctors, nurses and other medical workers treat them all in a cramped emergency room with six curtain areas and two enclosed rooms. The list goes on. No specific trauma room or decontamination space. A parking lot, with only two ambulance spaces, that is often crowded with six or seven emergency vehicles. Little privacy at registration or during treatment. "There are times you feel you need to speak more quietly. There is only so much privacy we can provide with the curtains," said physician assistant Sarah Redell, who discusses test results with patients and answers questions. A new $6.3 million emergency room planned for an autumn groundbreaking is expected to change that and other problems caused by lack of space. One problem cited by Elizabeth Suminski, an emergency doctor at Mercy for nine years: up to two-hour waits for treatment for some non-critical cases after triage. "This E.R. is pretty good about getting people seen quickly, but we don't have the space for them," Suminski said. At times, patient beds have to be wheeled into the hall area to make room for others. Krysta Lowe of Grayling said she once waited more than two hours to be treated for pink eye because several serious snowmobile accidents kept the medical staff busy. The emergency room was built in 1978 and now treats about 20,000 people a year, twice as many as then, said Pattie Walker, Mercy's emergency services director. Patients come from Crawford, Roscommon and Oscoda, as well as parts of Kalkaska and Montmorency counties. An ambulance ferried Theresa Roberts of Houghton Lake in after her doctor thought blood clots from a broken leg might enter her lungs. "I saw the doctor immediately. They scanned my leg and my lungs, gave me a breathing treatment and now I'm just waiting on my test results," Roberts said. Every bed around Roberts was filled with patients by the time the nurse removed her intravenous medicine drip, a couple of hours after she arrived. A $2.3 million goal for donations is within reach, said Teresa Money, Mercy's development director. So far, $1.8 million has been raised. The remaining $4 million for the new facility will be funded through loans. A $500,000 federal grant and a $500,000 gift from a Houghton Lake family recently boosted the coffers. The new emergency room is expected to open in the summer of 2007.
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