Rush Oak Park Hospital unveiled its new emergency department in a private grand opening Oct. 10. Illinois Senator Don Harmon, state Representative Camille Lilly, as well as Mayor Anan Abu-Taleb and village board trustees were in attendance.
The new LEED-certified facility is 55,000 square feet, allowing the hospital to serve far more patients than the hospital’s original emergency department built in 1969, which was designed to serve 15,000 patients yearly.
According to Rush Oak Park Hospital President and CEO Bruce Elegant, the planning process for the much-needed new department started about 2½ years ago. “It was just a twinkle in my eye at the time,” Elegant said. “The need was there, but it was finding the funding source and where it was going to be located.”
The project cost roughly $30 million, funded entirely by the hospital, and has 22 exam rooms, three triage rooms and an area, complete with lounge chairs, for patients to await results. “We will be able to expand to another three or four exam rooms should the need exist,” said Elegant. The old emergency department had 18 exam rooms, some of which, Elegant said, were converted closets and hallways.
“We built this ER for a capacity of about 50,000 visits; we’re at about 38,000 now, so it left us some room for growth,” Elegant said, adding that the hospital’s emergency room volume is up 3 percent from last year.
The new emergency department contains state-of-the-art equipment, including special entrances to exam rooms specifically for people with infectious diseases.
“If someone has a condition where we don’t want them walking through the main ER, there is a back door to the exam room to the ambulance bay, so the patient can go right in,” Elegant said.
The exam rooms located off the ambulance bay generate negative air pressure, so air flows in, not out, of the room, preventing airborne contaminants from spreading to other areas.
“The rooms also have a dedicated shower with a tank in the floor, so we can actually decontaminate somebody if they had a chemical spill or something like that,” Elegant said.
The facility also has all new monitoring and computer systems, as well as lifts for obese patients built into the ceiling and new technology that allows doctors to insert medical tubes into patients more easily.
The new emergency department, which took about 18 months to build, is set to open Oct. 16.
