Spring 2004

New Emergency Trauma Center to open in the fall

 If you’ve ever had to visit an emergency room on a Saturday night with a non-critical injury or illness, you most likely had to wait awhile to be treated.

At the end of the summer, patient wait times at St. John’s Hospital’s Emergency Trauma Center – the Ozarks’ only state-designated Level 1 trauma center for pediatric and adult patients – will be minimized when St. John’s opens its new 150,000-square-foot emergency trauma center and outpatient diagnostic center on the hospital’s northwest side.

The new center, which will house 45 treatment rooms, will be nearly twice the size of the existing ETC on the hospital’s southeast side. It will accommodate 85,000 visits per year, up from the 65,000 per year the existing ETC currently supports. Multiple triage nurses will be located just inside the entrance for faster service.

“It’s going to be a phenomenal trauma center,” says Bill Syler, St. John’s vice president of facilities. “It has direct and immediate access for critical patients through vertical integration of the facility and a patient-friendly atmosphere for those who are, in many cases, already in a stressful situation.”

The three floors above the ground floor ETC will house radiology services, the surgical intensive care unit, and the cardiac care unit, which will all connect to corresponding patient floors in the hospital’s West Pavilion. The building will also have four helicopter pads on the roof with direct elevator access to the six critical-care rooms in the new ETC.

“We’ll have six critical-care rooms fully equipped with power booms, surgical lights and trauma carts on each side of the room so the nurse can turn around and retrieve what they need quickly,” says John Bonnard, CEN, assistant director of St. John’s Emergency Trauma Center.

St. John’s will add another care team of trauma professionals once the new facility opens.

“We currently have three teams, plus our acute care center, where we see non-emergent cases. We’ll be expanding to four care teams in the new ETC in addition to the acute care center,” Bonnard says.

Seven covered bays on the west side of the new facility will allow multiple ambulances to unload patients at an entrance isolated from pedestrian and walk-in traffic. The ambulance bays will also connect to the hospital’s West Pavilion for non-emergent ambulance unloads.

“Another major advantage with this new facility is that we’ll be able to accommodate more ambulances and they will flow in and out of the bays without disrupting or blocking each other,” Syler says.

St. John’s plans to build a two-story parking deck near the new trauma center and a preferred-parking lot where the existing ETC is now located. The existing ETC will be razed when the new one opens.

Construction for phase II of the emergency trauma and outpatient diagnostic facility, which will add three to four more floors, will begin in 2006 or 2007.
Patients can visit one of St. John’s eight urgent care centers located in Springfield, Monett, Rolla, Branson and Lebanon, for serious illnesses or injuries that need immediate attention, but are not life-threatening.

Visit www.stjohns.com/clinics for a listing of St. John’s Urgent Care Clinics.