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Mesa ER Still Seeing Crush of Patients: Hospital Remains Open Despite Long Wait Times

Posted on: Tuesday, 3 January 2006, 15:00 CST

By Mary K. Reinhart, The Tribune, Mesa, Ariz., The Tribune, Mesa, Ariz.

Jan. 3--Patients waited up to 12 hours at east Mesa's Banner Baywood Medical Center emergency room Monday, but at least they weren't getting turned away.

For the second day, hospital officials canceled elective and nonemergency surgeries and used a 12-bed outpatient ward to house the sickest patients and expand the hospital's normal 242-bed capacity.

The crush of patients came later in the day, however, which gave doctors and nurses time to discharge those who had spent the night and make room for more.

"Until you get those discharges, you can't put people to bed," said Ellen O'Connor, director of the intensive care unit and dialysis. "Today we dodged that bullet." On Sunday the hospital closed its emergency room for three hours after a deluge of sick people filled the beds and left 90 people waiting, most of them suffering from flu and pneumonia. That forced emergency workers to treat patients in the parking lot or send them to other hospitals until Banner Baywood reopened at 2:30 p.m.

"What happened yesterday was extraordinary," said Banner Baywood CEO Don Evans. "We're doing everything possible to prevent it." Arizona is caught in the grip of a widespread flu outbreak, one of four Western states with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's highest designation for flu activity. With children returning to school and adults back to work after the holidays, state health officials worry that things will get worse before they get better.

Complicating matters for Banner Baywood, the hospital's patients tend to be older and therefore at higher risk, many are snowbirds who may not have a primary care physician in Arizona and it's the only hospital within a 10-mile radius, Evans said.

Although some of the patients probably could have been treated at an urgent care facility or stayed home, plenty of them were sick enough to be hospitalized.

"We're seeing a lot of pneumonia," O'Connor said. "We have folks that absolutely do need to be hospitalized."

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Copyright (c) 2006, The Tribune, Mesa, Ariz.

Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune Business News.

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Source: The Tribune

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