By ROBIN SHANNON

L’Observateur

LULING – The recently completed new emergency department at St. Charles Parish Hospital, which is designed to handle everything from minor ailments to major accidents at industrial plants, celebrated its grand opening Friday with tours of the facility.

The facility underwent a roughly $4 million makeover that offers expanded space, new equipment and a quicker patient flow. Although the project is complete, the ER won’t be online until next month after it gains certification from the state Department of Health and Hospitals.

“This is a tremendous day for St. Charles Parish,” said Hospital Board Chairman John J. Landry III. “There are few parishes in the region that have an emergency room that looks like this. This was a desperate need for St. Charles Parish.”

The project expands the hospital’s emergency room from 3,500 square feet to more than 12,000 square feet. A new configuration allows for more fluid movement with the goal of moving patients through the system quickly.

“If someone comes in needing healthcare from the hospital, the emergency room is typically where they start,” Landry said. “We needed a facility that could cater to the needs of a growing parish.”

One of the marquee improvements in the new emergency room is a self-contained decontamination area with its own entrance and ventilation system that is designed to limit the spread of contaminants in the event of an industrial accident at one of the plants in the parish.

Other features include new treatment rooms broken down based on the sickness level of the patient. Non-life threatening ER patients and more serious cases will have separate wait areas so the hospital can better process patients through the system.

Voters in St. Charles approved an $11.5 million bond issue for the emergency room project and other improvements last year from a tax dedicated to the 53-year-old hospital. The balance of the money went to buying and refurbishing the hospital’s east bank ambulance station and buying five new ambulances and other equipment.

“We identified a need, we made a plan, and we saw it through to fruition,” said St. Charles Parish President V.J. St. Pierre Jr.

Federico Martinez, CEO of the hospital, said the ER project, coupled with other improvements from the bond issue that will bring in new services and new physicians, is part of a plan to attract more parish residents to the parish’s health-care system. He said the hospital is looking to attract more of the parish’s east bank residents, who usually get their healthcare from other outlets.

“Taxpayers in this parish paid for the improvements,” Martinez said. “If they are not using it, they are missing out on their own facility. We want to change that.”