Methodist Hospital reopens with new name, fewer beds

22nd September 2014   ·   0 Comments

By Michael Patrick Welch
Contributing Writer

When it’s said that a place smells “like a hospital,” it’s usually not a compliment. But the nine-week-old New Orleans East Hospital smells brand new. Sunlight pours into every room from an abundance of windows, highlighting the spotlessness of beds and waiting-room chairs where few patients have sat.

After four years of planning, negotiations and community outcry, the once languished former Methodist hospital is now back in service with beds, new staff and even a new name. The New Orleans East Hospital is now fully staffed and set to service 160,000 nearby lives: 125,000 or so from New Orleans East and the Lower 9, and over 35,000 in St. Bernard Parish.

According to data provided in a pre-construction feasibility study, the population of NOEH’s primary and secondary service areas declined by approximately 50 percent due to Hurricane Katrina.

“The New Orleans East Hospital was built to serve the existing census base in its primary service areas, New Orleans East, Gentilly and the Lower Ninth,” said Hyma Moore, a spokesperson for the hospital. “Prior to Hurricane Katrina, the service area maintained a population well over 200,000 residents, requiring more capacity at the former Methodist Hospital. The New Orleans East Hospital will expand over time, and services will develop as they’re needed and as demand for services grows.”

The hospital reopened on July 12 and received its final accreditation on August 18. In the time it’s been open, the hospital has already treated more than 2,500 within the Emergency Depart­ment, and admitted over 140 patients for a higher level of care beyond what they can provide in the emergency capacity.

During a recent tour of the new facility, CEO Mario Garner told The Louisiana Weekly about the drive to give the new hospital “local flavor,” from the 120 pieces of local art and photography that line the walls, to its staff. According to Garner, the NOEH partnered with the city’s Office of Workforce Development to hire locally including bringing back former Methodist staff.

”Many of the staff are ‘boomer­ang employees’ from the former Methodist Hospital,” Garner said. “More than 80 percent of the staff live in New Orleans; the rest are from Slidell, St. Bernard Parish and the surrounding area.”

Also on the tour was Charlotte Parent, founder of Touro Hospital’s Birthing Center and current Director of Health for the City of New Orleans. According to Parent, the hospital maintains a partnership with Touro to handle all of its incoming births. Parent sees New Orleans East Hospital — like the new nearby Walmart, newly renovated public library and Joe Brown Park — as a catalyst for economic development in the area. “This hospital is a homecoming for people who want to come back to New Orleans East,” she claims.

When Methodist Hospital opened in 1968, it was as a 180-bed general acute care hospital. In 2005, the hospital had 306 beds, whereas the New Orleans East Hospital currently features only 80 beds. Approximately 430 physicians and more than 1,000 staff members worked at Methodist Hospital in 2005, while the New Orleans East Hospital employs only 73 physicians and 178 staff members.

“The Hospital Service District A Board will regularly assess the needs for expansion by continuously monitoring service needs of the community,” said Garner.

The hospital is owned by the Hospital Service District A and managed by LCMC Health.

Most of the hospital was retrofitted to the old Methodist Building that was destroyed in Katrina’s flood; the new cafeteria and other areas comprise new space. Currently, only its second floor, 18-bed Emergency Department and Critical Care Area is full of patients.

“Clinical services are above the second floor, above the flood zone,” said Garner, while pointing out the many upgrades from the Methodist years. “In the unlikely instance of water in the building we can still maintain fluid operations.”

The second floor also houses a ten-bed pediatric unit, a 14-bed intensive care unit, and a ten-bed step down progressive care unit, plus the new hospital’s nuclear medicine area, and imagining services from MRI and CT machines to women’s imaging, bone density, mammography, fluoroscopy and ultrasound machines.

On the second floor, the director of the Emergency Department Reginald Vicks, a “boomerang employee,” recounted his time at Methodist during Katrina. During his time at Methodist, Vicks was the Director of Emergency De­part­ment, and one of the last to eva­cuate the old hospital during Katrina.

“The ER team cleared out the building, then we left,” recalled Vicks whose wife currently works at Children’s Hospital. “I did a stint in Dallas for a year, and I’ve been back since 2006…working at different hospitals in the city… Now we’re back.”

The third floor surgery areas contain four operating rooms, two GI suites, a cardiac cath lab, recovery area and pharmacy.

The majority of the hospital’s future patients will stay in 26 patient beds on the forth floor once that floor opens. Garner anticipates the fourth floor will open in late October. The fifth floor is a replica of the forth floor but with six fewer beds “for patients who aren’t sick enough for ICU or Pro­gressive Care Unit,” said Garner. The hospital is currently waiting on more conditional connections so that nurses on those two floors can keep tabs on patients hooked to telemetry monitors that track every patient’s heartbeat from the front desks.

The new hospital’s sixth and final floor is the state-of-the-art gym-style Outpatient Rehab Area, which includes cardiac rehab, plus physical and speech therapy services. While also built to help with strength and conditioning for patients with muscular atrophy, Director of Rehab Services, Lindsey Mc­Cormick explained, “It’s mostly for patients who’ve had a catch procedure to widen the arteries for blood flow, and for taking pictures of the heart to see where there is blockage get on a treadmill to be monitored by a nurse.” Though the floor was empty at the time of the tour, McCormick said it is open now by appointment. “And soon it will be full,” she said. “We are ramping it up.”

Garner expects that the hospital will be a efficient its operations and performance, due in some part to the setup of the Affordable Care Act.

“The ACA is going to force hospitals to be more transparent, and force hospitals to become top performers, because your reimbursement is going to be tiered,” Garner said. He believes that the ACA’s “Pay for Performance” system is pushing healthcare facilities to be more efficient.

“It (Pay for Performance) forces a lot more transparency and informed consumerism,” he said. “It forces public reporting. So I think it’s a positive in that it makes us really strive toward superior quality healthcare.”

Garner proudly ads, “We have medicine doctors who are here every day to take care of medical admits; surgeons here everyday to take care of surgical admits; cardiologists, radiologists.”

“If we are a top performer, we are going to do very well in today’s healthcare environment,” Garner said.

This article originally published in the September 22, 2014 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.