NCH Baker Hospital opens new emergency department

NCH Baker is opening its new emergency department on Monday, with larger rooms that offer more privacy and state-of-the-art equipment to make it easier to treat people faster.

The new 19,000-square-foot department has a CT scanner with the highest capacity of all of NCH’s facilities, which will help take care of strokes, trauma, and other needs immediately within the emergency department. There are also two triage rooms to help bring in patients faster, radiology capabilities to evaluate things like simple ankle sprains, and high-acuity rooms for patients who need more care. The NCH Baker emergency room sees around 45,000 visits each year, making it the busiest within the NCH system. Doctors say this new department will help provide more functional, personalized and private care for patients.

Shawn Patterson is the chair of emergency medicine at NCH and knows that no one wants to go to the emergency room, but especially not in the middle of a pandemic. “When you go to the emergency department, it’s invariably not your best day,” Patterson said.

“The rooms offer privacy, they offer, you know, more comfort, they’re quiet, they kind of block out a lot of the things that would have been coming in from the outside parts of a busy emergency department—the noise, the commotion—and allow us to really focus on that one-on-one patient interaction,” said Dr. Todd Bethel, medical director of the NCH Baker emergency department.

“We dedicated a 128-slice CT scanner and 2 X-RAY rooms so that those diagnostics can be performed right in the emergency department,” said Patterson.

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