Editorial – New emergency facility will serve growing population

Published: Tuesday, April 29, 2014 at 10:24 p.m. Last Modified: Tuesday, April 29, 2014 at 10:24 p.m.

Its scary when you or a family member needs to go to the emergency room. By next spring, residents living in northern New Hanover and eastern Pender counties will have greater peace of mind should a medical emergency occur. New Hanover Regional Medical Center broke ground Tuesday for a new, full-service emergency room near the county line.

It will be a welcome addition to the areas health care network. Access to good medical care is one of the many things people consider when they move or retire to an area. NHRMC regularly treats patients from a seven-county area, and as the population of the region grows, the hospital must keep up.

The hospital has grown over the years, from a single facility to buildings on several sites that specialize in orthopedics, cancer treatment, womens and childrens medical needs, psychiatric care and rehabilitation. New Hanover Regional owns Cape Fear Memorial Hospital and has management agreement to operate Pender Memorial Hospital.

Population growth in the Hampstead/Porters Neck/Scotts Hill area has created a need for a 24-hour emergency room to serve the area. Whether by ambulance or by personal car, its important to get to an emergency room quickly. It can be quite a drive from those and nearby communities to a full-fledged emergency room, and when you or a loved one needs help right now, the distance seems even longer.

A recent report by the nonprofit news organization Pro Publica found that wait times in New Hanover Regionals emergency room were longer than other hospitals in the region, although they were not too different from other hospitals with trauma centers, which treat critically injured patients. The main emergency department gets more than 80,000 visits per year, and Cape Fears smaller emergency room sees about 35,000 a year. Those numbers are only projected to grow.

The new emergency room should help reduce wait times by providing residents of northern New Hanover County and eastern Pender County a more convenient place to go with medical conditions that need immediate treatment. It also will create 50 new jobs, many of which will go to locally trained people.

The new facility will be next to the hospitals outpatient surgery clinic, Atlantic SurgiCenter, off Market Street just south of the Pender County line. Trauma patients and patients who need critical care will be taken to the main hospital off South 17th Street, but the new facility will be a fully operational ER with the means to stabilize patients before sending them to Wilmington.

The Porters Neck area has a privately run urgent care center that is open from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. It serves a need and will continue to do so; not all ailments or injuries need ER treatment, and having facilities that handle less critical medical problems takes the burden off already-busy emergency rooms.

The 30,000-square-foot building will cost about $15.1 million and is expected to open in June 2015.

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Editorial - New emergency facility will serve growing population