CHARLESTON, W.Va. — Thomas Health System announced Wednesday that it will reopen the emergency room at St. Francis Hospital in downtown Charleston early next year.
Thomas Health closed its 24-hour emergency room at the hospital in 2016 and has been running an urgent care clinic since but COO Brian Ulery said the needs of the area have changed and it’s time to return emergency care to St. Francis.
“We decided that’s what was best for our community, to help alleviate the strain on emergency departments, and to also facilitate quick, efficient patient care throughout the community,” Ulery told MetroNews.
The new emergency room will not be a 24-hour operation. Ulery said Thomas Health believes an ER at St. Francis will have the most impact from 10 a.m. to 9 p.m. Monday through Saturday.
“It looks like all of the emergency departments locally, including ours, tend to be fairly busy between the afternoon and early evening hours,” Ulery said. “We looked at the regulations and it turns out there’s a different type of emergency department that allows us to provide the same kind of quality care that people will remember at St. Francis and do so with limited hours.”
Thomas Health Chief Medical Officer Dr. Matthew Upton said the schedule is attractive and he doesn’t believe there will be a difficulty in recruiting staff for the new ER.
“The fact that your day ends at 10 p.m. and you get home to your family is very lucrative, I would think from a staffing standpoint,” Upton said. “So far that has been the experience with our hires. It’s a sought-after position.”
Upton said ER operations throughout the region remain busy because of the ongoing pandemic and the difficulty hospitals are having with staffing patient floors.
“The inability to staff all of the beds on the floors, which means sometimes patients back up into the emergency room,” Upton said. “So we are seeing ER volumes increase but we also see the time it takes to stay in the emergency room awaiting a bed upstairs increase and that is happening across the valley.”
St. Francis also served as a surge hospital in connection with the pandemic beginning in late-April 2020.