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Since October, Freeman Neosho Hospital has undergone some construction, which in turn will help patients who utilize the emergency department.
“As a critical access hospital, we have the busiest emergency room in the state of Missouri,” Freeman Neosho Chief Executive Officer Daxton Holcomb said. “We see, on average, about 17,000 patients a year through our ER. We have six rooms to see all of those patients with. We needed to add some rooms in order to better serve the community. This brings us up to nine, and we have not started the rooms yet. We look to have everything up and running with the additional equipment installed shortly after Jan. 1.”
What the hospital actually did was utilize some rooms that had recently opened up adjacent to the radiology department.
“We opened up the Gary Duncan Women’s (Pavilion on Nov. 7) across the street in the (Freeman) medical office building,” Holcomb said. “That holds mammography and bone density, the new digital mammography service that we have here. And when we moved that out, that enabled us to have some more room in radiology, which is immediately adjacent to the ER. So that is actually where our construction took place.”
According to Tony Mitchell, director of emergency and trauma services at Freeman Neosho, two of the rooms will basically have the same set-up as the emergency rooms they currently have.
“We can take any type of patient that we are currently taking,” Mitchell said. “In one room we are actually going to have more of what we are going to call a ‘mid-level room,’ where patients can get triage quicker, and then go back through that room and actually get the process of lab work, x-rays, started a lot sooner than we have been able to do that.
“A smaller room we are going to have for maybe procedures like suturing, suture removal, that type of stuff. A lot of issues that we have been running into is patients waiting and we don’t want that to happen, obviously, or as little as possible. And a lot of times if we get a couple of ambulances at one time, that ties the staff up. And then the people that have come in for maybe a minor thing, which is an earache or something that is not really critical, they end up waiting longer. We want to try to help the community out — that is our goal is to find another way to get those people to where they can get treated quicker.”
Since October, Freeman Neosho Hospital has undergone some construction, which in turn will help patients who utilize the emergency department.
“As a critical access hospital, we have the busiest emergency room in the state of Missouri,” Freeman Neosho Chief Executive Officer Daxton Holcomb said. “We see, on average, about 17,000 patients a year through our ER. We have six rooms to see all of those patients with. We needed to add some rooms in order to better serve the community. This brings us up to nine, and we have not started the rooms yet. We look to have everything up and running with the additional equipment installed shortly after Jan. 1.”
What the hospital actually did was utilize some rooms that had recently opened up adjacent to the radiology department.
“We opened up the Gary Duncan Women’s (Pavilion on Nov. 7) across the street in the (Freeman) medical office building,” Holcomb said. “That holds mammography and bone density, the new digital mammography service that we have here. And when we moved that out, that enabled us to have some more room in radiology, which is immediately adjacent to the ER. So that is actually where our construction took place.”
According to Tony Mitchell, director of emergency and trauma services at Freeman Neosho, two of the rooms will basically have the same set-up as the emergency rooms they currently have.
“We can take any type of patient that we are currently taking,” Mitchell said. “In one room we are actually going to have more of what we are going to call a ‘mid-level room,’ where patients can get triage quicker, and then go back through that room and actually get the process of lab work, x-rays, started a lot sooner than we have been able to do that.
“A smaller room we are going to have for maybe procedures like suturing, suture removal, that type of stuff. A lot of issues that we have been running into is patients waiting and we don’t want that to happen, obviously, or as little as possible. And a lot of times if we get a couple of ambulances at one time, that ties the staff up. And then the people that have come in for maybe a minor thing, which is an earache or something that is not really critical, they end up waiting longer. We want to try to help the community out — that is our goal is to find another way to get those people to where they can get treated quicker.”
