Saint Francis Hospital will move forward with its plan to convert its emergency room into an urgent care clinic, and will have completed the transition in a month, hospital officials say.
Dan Lauffer, president and CEO of Thomas Health System, said the downtown hospital's ER will become the Saint Francis First Health and Wellness Center effective April 25.
According to Lauffer, the decision to turn Saint Francis' ER into an urgent care clinic is the result of both changes in the region's health care landscape and Saint Francis' proximity to other hospitals - roughly 80 percent of patients who visit Saint Francis' ER do so for non-emergency medical issues, he said.
"The numbers may be different elsewhere, but I doubt it, because this is becoming the case almost everywhere in the country - emergency rooms are full of people being seen for non-emergent issues," Lauffer said.
There are also two other hospital emergency rooms within walking distance of Saint Francis - Charleston Area Medical Center's General and Women and Children's hospitals - and Lauffer said the hospital system hopes that an urgent care clinic downtown will be able to meet a more definite need than an emergency room.
"We would never be doing this if this were the only emergency room in this part of town, but there are three within walking distance of each other," he said. "Everyone in the world, whether they're enrolled in an [Affordable Care Act] plan or something else, their insurers are telling them, 'Don't go to the ER, go where you can get the care you need.' What we're trying to do is develop the care model in which the resources we have are dedicated to treating the right patients in the right place at the right time."
Staff at the hospital were officially informed of the change Thursday afternoon, and Lauffer said that although the staffing mix for the urgent care clinic will likely be different and include more mid-level providers, like advanced practice nurses, he anticipates "little to no job loss" in the change.
"We value every employee, and we believe there is going to be little to no job loss in terms of opportunities for them," he said. "I can't guarantee they'll all have exactly the same job they have right now, but we're working on opportunities elsewhere within the system."
The West Virginia Healthcare Authority has already waived the system's Certificate of Need review for the change. Lauffer said the new urgent care clinic will be more "patient-centered" than an ER, and any patient who comes into the clinic with an emergency will be stabilized and transferred to an ER.
Lauffer also addressed concerns that there would be other changes to Saint Francis, or that all or part of the hospital might close, saying that the rest of the hospital would be unaffected by the ER change.
"Certainly, we have fluctuations in volume and we adjust our staffing for that, but that doesn't mean we're closing the place," he said. "We're in the process of recruiting doctors...we wouldn't be recruiting people, we wouldn't be investing in a new IT system for both hospitals... we're talking millions of dollars of investment."
Lauffer said the Saint Francis urgent care aligns with the system's other plans to address the state's changing health care landscape.
In February, Thomas announced a partnership with Stonerise Healthcare to build a $17 million post-acute care facility in South Charleston on the Thomas Memorial Hospital campus. The proposed facility will be approximately 71,000 square feet and will specialize in six post-acute care arenas: pulmonary, cardiac telemetry, joint-replacement rehabilitation, wound care, cancer/palliative care and long-term care.
Reach Lydia Nuzum at lydia.nuzum@wvgazettemail.com, 304-348-5189 or follow @lydianuzum on Twitter.