Flooded with light, colorful and quiet, St. Vincent Regional Medical Center’s new emergency room is not only twice as big as it was but also on its way to becoming doubly efficient.

The first phase of new construction opened with 26 beds Sept. 21, while the old 1980s-style emergency room is being gutted. By Christmas, St. Vincent’s $12 million emergency-room renovation and expansion is scheduled to be finished.

The state’s second busiest emergency room will have a total of 44 beds. An ambulance bay and entrance, as well as an 18-bed section for patients with minor conditions (such as sore throats and sinus infections), are under construction.

Like other emergency rooms across the country, St. Vincent has been feeling the pinch of crowding for quite a while. The existing facility was designed for 45,000 patient visits a year, but the volume has risen to 62,000 patient visits. One-fourth of them are children.

Long waits have caused frustration for patients, and even after getting into the ER, some patients have ended up on a bed in the hallway instead of a room. Also, without separate waiting and treatment rooms for children and adults, some children have been exposed to victims of stabbings, addicts reeling from overdoses and the gasps of dying patients.

Now, besides being bigger and better organized — with a distinct waiting room where children can play computer games and read books — the medical staff has transformed how the emergency room does business.

The philosophy is to get patients out of the waiting room faster and into a private treatment room with a sound-muting glass door, instead of a thin curtain. Most rooms boast a flat-screen TV, a DVD player and a telephone. And rocking chairs have been placed in a few rooms designated for children.

“It’s much nicer than it was before because the rooms are enclosed and private,” a patient, who preferred not to give her name, said before being released Thursday. Her pastel room featured a framed painting of a Southwestern landscape.

Rather than making patients move from place to place, the new ER brings services to the patient. A computer on wheels can be rolled into a patient’s room for bedside registration. So can X-ray machines and diagnostic tests.

Computerized charting will be added in the rooms next year.

“The wait times seem to be less, even though we have the same amount of beds,” Dr. Frantz Melio, executive director of Emergency Department Operations, said while showing off the new facility last week.

Family members or friends who wait while a patient is being treated can use computers in the business center.

FreemanWhite Inc., a North Carolina firm that specializes in hospital design, and Hartman & Majewski Design Group in Albuquerque mapped out the changes at St. Vincent.

A circle drive leads up to the blue and rust entrance. Patients can take an elevator from the lower parking level. The parking lot near the entrance has 14 spaces reserved for people with disabilities.

ER crowding a national crisis

Crowding can compromise the quality of patient care. According to three national studies, people with severe pain are suffering too long in emergency rooms and people with pneumonia aren’t getting antibiotics in a timely manner, if at all. Some patients leave without treatment.

“Emergency department crowding is a public health crisis in the United States,” Dr. Judd Hollander, author of one of the studies and president of the Society for Academic Emergency Medicine, said in a statement.

Reasons behind the gridlock include a loss of hospital inpatient beds because of financial pressures, a shortage of on-call specialists, a growing elderly population and a shortage of doctors and nurses, according to the American College of Emergency Physicians.

When launching the expansion project, St. Vincent said patients would be able to see a doctor in 22 minutes rather than waiting an hour, according to one planning document. And the total visit would be cut from 3 1/2 hours to two hours.

But last week, the hospital’s chief executive officer, Alex Valdez, said official benchmarks are in the process of being set.

New system gets staff in the zone

Meanwhile, the staff is learning how to work in the new facility. Dividing the space into four zones was important because the same number of beds are spread out over 22,000 square feet, compared to 12,000 square feet in the past.

“Every zone is set up to function by itself,” Melio said.

A team of doctors, nurses and other health workers is assigned to each zone, which covers about seven rooms. The first zone contains some trauma and mental-health rooms. The third zone contains some isolation rooms. Otherwise the load is the same for each team.

Flexibility is paramount to operational improvements. The emergency room purchased color-coded carts that are loaded with supplies to meet a variety of situations and can be rolled into any treatment room.

Green carts are for orthopedic cases. Turquoise carts are for obstetrics and gynecology. Red carts are for wound dressings. Rainbow carts are for pediatric cases. Blue carts, in different sizes, are for doctors and nurses.

“This is a plus for the patient,” said Jan Papelbon, a registered nurse who is the new director of the ER. She used to be director of ER at Lovelace Westside Hospital in Albuquerque.

Part of her new job, she said, is to look at work processes and make it a “fantastic” emergency department. Papelbon said one goal is to evaluate and stabilize patients quickly, then get them moved upstairs into one the hospital’s 248 beds.

Working to overcome specialist shortage

St. Vincent, a private, nonprofit hospital, runs one of three trauma centers in the state, which means it gets patients who demand high-level care, such as automobile crash victims. Beyond building a new facility, the hospital has been working to solve another problem — a shortage of specialists. Without adequate coverage by orthopedic surgeons and neurosurgeons, the hospital has had to send patients to Albuquerque or even out-of-state destinations.

Dr. David Gunderson, chairman of the hospital’s board of trustees, said St. Vincent has been successful in hiring specialists over the past year and continues to recruit more.

“We’ve had a challenge for 10 years to have 24/7 coverage of our ER,” he said.

Gunderson believes coverage is much improved, but some specialized cases, such as burn victims, still will require attention from the state’s highest-level trauma center at University Hospital in Albuquerque.

“I think we see the emergency-room expansion and a number of changes we’re making at the hospital as all part of a vision that we adopted a year ago after consulting with the community and the physicians and the employees,” Gunderson said. “And our current vision is: exceptional medicine, extraordinary care, every person, every day.”

Contact Diana Del Mauro at 986-3066 or dianadm@sfnewmexican.com.

If you go:

• What: St. Vincent Hospital Foundation Glamour and Gauze Gala, a benefit to raise money for the pediatric sections of the emergency room; celebrity co-hosts Amy and Judge Reinhold and Maura and Wes Studi have planned a dinner, dancing, live auction and a performance by comedian Bob Newhart.
• When: Oct. 20
• Where: Eldorado Hotel
• Cost: Tickets are $250 per person. For more information, call 820-5209.