A new home for emergency care at Children’s
from Caring For Our Future, Summer 2006
By Lee Varga, BSN, RN
The Children’s Hospital in Denver cares for a special patient population, many of whom enter through our busy Emergency Department (ED). For this reason, the ED has been called the defender of the front line. For the department’s nursing staff, the beauty of building a new home for The Children’s Hospital is the ability to select innovative and enhanced features to meet the specific needs of our department’s patients and families.
One positive change families will notice quickly is the large amount of available parking. The waiting room will be larger and more visible to the triage nurse who can rapidly begin the process of evaluating patients. Advances were made in the area of infection control to help protect patients, staff and family as the ED performs the initial assessment needed to treat each individual child’s illness or injury.
Because we never forget our first priority is taking great care of the patient, every patient in the ED will have his own room with wall-mounted monitors, thermometers and exam lights. Because every family deserves privacy and comfort, caregiver stations will have water, ice and microwaves more readily available. All patient rooms will come equipped with video portals to keep patients big and small entertained with movies and games that are not shared by others.
There will be four trauma/resuscitation rooms and two rooms dedicated to procedures to provide excellent care and decrease wait time for families. Three rooms will be set aside for the evaluation and care of the pediatric psychiatric population seen in the ED. The psychiatric area will have a pod to closely monitor and care for these patients. One unique type of patient who enters Children’s through the ED is the immunecompromised child. It is important for these patients to have as little exposure as possible to the bacteria, viruses or fungi that may be present in the ED. The new Children’s Hospital will have three positive-fl ow (protective) rooms with private bathrooms located directly off the triage room for quick entry into an air-controlled environment. Besides the three positive fl ow rooms, there will be six negative-flow (airborne isolation precautions) rooms. A separate nursing station will allow for the isolation of potentially contagious patients and the protection of others within the hospital.
The entire ED will have its own separate exhaust system to purge air that may be contaminated, preventing the air from entering the hospital’s general airflow system. To respond to victims of mass casualty suspected of being contaminated by biological or chemical weapons material, the ED at the new hospital will have a decontamination area. Two rooms, located by the ambulance bay, will be set up for this function. One room will have six shower stalls for ambulatory patients. The other will have eight showerheads to care for critical, non-ambulatory patients. A new sub-waiting area will serve patients who need to be separated from the general population.
The many improvements to the observation area will include sinks in all rooms to encourage hand washing and to minimize room-to-room transmission of bacteria and viruses. Two of the observation rooms are negative flow, and will have private bathrooms to protect other patients and staff. The new ED also will feature a larger sleeping area with more comfortable seating for families who remain in the ED overnight.
Children’s Emergency Department staff look forward to the day when we will begin to care for sick and injured children in this state-of-the-art environment.
