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Showers and thunderstorms this morning, then partly cloudy during the afternoon hours. It will be windy. High near 80F. Winds NW at 20 to 30 mph. Chance of rain 80%. Higher wind gusts possible..

Partly cloudy skies. Low 56F. Winds NW at 15 to 25 mph.

Wednesday, officials at Yankton’s Avera Sacred Heart Hospital announced plans to update the Emergency Department for the first time since 2006. The project is expected to begin this summer and could take six months to complete.

Wednesday, officials at Yankton’s Avera Sacred Heart Hospital announced plans to update the Emergency Department for the first time since 2006. The project is expected to begin this summer and could take six months to complete.

Yankton’s Avera Sacred Heart Hospital (ASHH) has announced it is remodeling its emergency room (ER) with an eye towards security, privacy and workflow.

This will be the first significant renovation of that space since 2006, Doug Ekeren, regional president and ASHH CEO, said at a press conference Wednesday.

“As we celebrate our 125-year history of providing services here, the emergency department has always been an important part of the services that we provide and is the front door, roughly, for a third or more of the patients that come to the hospital,” he said.

The three main goals of the project include keeping patients and employees safe, ensuring privacy and improving workflow for the staff, Ekeren said.

“Given all of the challenges that we are seeing around the country at health care facilities, and violence and threats on health care workers and those who are receiving our services, we want to enhance that safety feature,” he said. “We’re not immune from that here, and we have had threatening situations. This will help us keep both patients and staff safer during those times.”

Input received through the years from staff, patients and family members have been incorporated into some of the updates being implemented, Ekeren noted.

Renovations and updates will include:

• Securing and simplifying the registration area to make it more welcoming;

• Securing the hospital’s communications switchboard to protect all critical facility-wide communication daily and in the event of a facility-wide emergency;

• Converting a portion of the waiting room into a triage area that staff can use to identify the most critical patients and prioritize medical attention;

• Enclosing the central staff workspace for privacy and patient confidentiality;

• Adding a place in each treatment room to secure patient belongings while keeping the space clear;

• Adding storage to serve departmental needs;

“A lot of times, when a patient comes into the emergency department, there’s a lot of confusion of which window they should be going to because we have a couple of those,” said Carrie L. Mastalir RN, MSN and clinical nurse manager of Emergency Services. “Cleaning up this whole front entrance will clear up where they actually need to go, and we’ll have somebody sitting in this area to greet all of our patients.”

In addition to sorting out the most serious cases, the triage room would be used to start treatment right away if there is no room immediately available in the ER.

“We practice a concept called ‘pull to full,’ which means we bring all of our patients back until our emergency room is full,” Mastalir explained. “Then, we triage all of our patients with the Standardized Emergency Severity Index, so we have an idea of the severity of the patients’ conditions.”

In instances where the ER physician is occupied with a patient at a critical stage, triage nurses have been able to stabilize patients before the ER physician is available, added Dr. Benjamin Aaker, MD, ASHH emergency medicine physician.

“We want to be able to greet patients and their family members immediately, identify who the patient is and what the immediate concern is and then be able to (have them) visited by a health-care provider in the triage area, in which we have some of the initial equipment that we can use to start taking care of them as soon as possible,” he said.

“When we’re in those surge moments, we’ll have a nurse (up front) to help with triage and keep an eye on the waiting room,” Mastalir added. “(That) will be a little bit safer for patients who have to wait in case something changes in their situation, because that happens from time to time as well.”

Enclosing the central staff area inside the ER will help reduce the ambient noise level, she said.

“If you’ve ever been a patient in the hospital, you know how the noise carries and you can hear even the quietest conversations about other people,” Mastalir said. “This also will give nurses a place to process their emotions between patients because, sometimes, we have difficult situations that we have to deal with, and we have to pull ourselves together pretty quickly to get to the next patient.”

Five of the 10 emergency treatment rooms have east-facing windows, which will be glare-coated to facilitate reading instrumentation. For infection prevention, privacy curtains will be replaced by frosted glass doors. Cameras are being installed to monitor patients when privacy doors are closed, she added.

“A lot of time was taken to balance privacy versus being able to know when there’s a patient in need,” Aaker noted. “We don’t want this to be so walled off that we can’t get that information from them.”

The project, which starts this summer, could take up to six months to complete. Emergency room services will not be interrupted, Ekeren said, adding that the Avera Foundation is soliciting donations to fund the more than $400,000 project.

For information about donating, contact Sheila Kuchta at Sheila.Kuchta@avera.org or 605-668-8687.

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