Lakeview builds up emergency department

Lakeview Hospital broke ground last week on a $4 million expansion of its emergency department.

The existing emergency room facilities were constructed in 1994, with seven beds to serve about 5,000 patients each year.

Dr. Thomas Monahan, medical director of the Lakeview emergency department, said it now serves between 12,000 and 13,000 patients a year -- a figure that is expected to rise as federal health care reform is implemented.

"We just haven't had enough rooms to see people, especially on the weekends," Monahan said.

The total number of beds will increase from seven to 12, Monahan said. Instead of curtains separating the beds, each bed will be in a private room. The remodeling of the existing space will be completed by next fall.

The construction is part of a larger renovation plan to modernize the hospital.

The Stillwater hospital initially considered building a new $30 million, 60,000-square-foot patient tower, said hospital president Curt Geissler.

The emergency department renovations are the final step in the larger plan. In all, the work will cost about $13 million, funded by the $20 million Best Medicine capital campaign that closed in 2008. The remainder of the campaign has already been spent on projects, including the hospital's oncology center and heart center.

About 5,000 square feet of new space will be added to the emergency department, including a second ambulance bay and an additional trauma room for patients with life-threatening injuries.

"We still don't have the wait times that the inner city or more urban, larger hospitals have, but our wait times have been growing slowly," Monahan said. He estimated a busy city hospital might average two- to three-hour waits at peak times, while Lakeview's wait times on the weekend can be up to an hour.

The city of Stillwater conducted an acoustical review of the proposed plans before issuing a special-use permit for the expansion. The new structure will have noisy ventilator units on the roof; the design was adjusted to reduce those noise levels, said Bill Turnblad, city community development director.

"As a community, we try to balance the desire to have a good quality hospital right in our community with the needs of residents immediately next to it," Turnblad said.

"We just believe we're positioning ourselves for future growth and the aging population," he said.

As part of new state regulations, the hospital will be designated a Level Three trauma center when the expansion is complete, Geissler said. That means it will staff emergency physicians 24 hours a day and have specialists, such as a general surgeon or urologist, who could see a patient within 30 minutes.