LULING — St. Charles Parish Hospital recently broke ground on a new 12,000-square-foot Emergency Department.

When citizens of St. Charles Parish need emergency care, a state-of-the-art Emergency Department will be only a few minutes away. The new Emergency Department at St. Charles Parish Hospital will utilize new designs developed and recommended by the Health Care Advisory Board from Washington D.C. This new Emergency Department will facilitate shorter wait times, increased patient privacy, larger rooms for ease in accessing and caring for patients and technologically advanced equipment.

The redesign of the Emergency Department will improve efficiency by reducing front-end bottlenecks resulting in faster care, implementing multifunctional treatment rooms to allow for more flexibility in their use, and allowing for movement of patients to appropriate care settings. The new design will relieve the strain on our Emergency Department and result in improved patient experiences.

According to St. Charles Parish Hospital CEO Fred Martinez, “When we commit to a project like this we try to approach it from multiple angles. We researched the latest in Emergency Department design and visited several hospitals around the country in order to determine what would work best for our community.”

Martinez added that “with the help of Joe Guarisco, MD, Head of Emergency Medicine at Ochsner Health System, we were able to finalize the plans, and I believe the residents of St. Charles Parish will be pleased with the final product.”

The target for completion of the new Emergency Department is late 2011.