PORT ANGELES — Olympic Medical Center officials want to continue the Rapid Treatment Unit at the hospital’s emergency department after a three-month test improved wait times and garnered praise from patients.
The unit opened Jan. 6 as a way to divert less-seriously ill or injured patients from full emergency treatment and to tend them and send them home in less time.
After treating 300 patients in January and at least 371 patients in February at the Rapid Treatment Unit, the length of stay for each of the 4,469 patients who visited the emergency department during that time dropped by 10 minutes, hospital CEO Eric Lewis told hospital district commissioners Wednesday.
‘Positive effect’
“We’re improving throughout,” he said. “It’s really having a positive effect.”
Lewis had signed off on the unit’s $40,000 startup but needs commissioners’ approval for the nearly $166,000 it will take to continue the service through 2015.
Commissioners expect to do so at their April 1 meeting.
Included in the cost is a doubling of hours for advanced-practice clinicians — usually known as registered nurse practitioners — who staff the Rapid Treatment Unit from noon to midnight daily.
The unit is a preliminary step toward the walk-in clinic that OMC hopes to add to its Port Angeles campus when it builds a medical office building later this year across from the main hospital, 939 Caroline St.
“We need a Port Angeles walk-in clinic,” Lewis said, “but I think this program for the rest of 2015 is really beneficial.”
In other action Wednesday, commissioners learned that OMC hopes to hire this spring a psychiatric nurse practitioner who will work at OMC clinics for Peninsula Behavioral Health, part of integrating mental health treatment into OMC’s primary care services.
Mingling of treatment
Such a mingling of treatment will be key to meeting new state directives that are looming under the Healthier Washington program that will pay for coordinated physical, mental and substance-abuse care.
Commissioners also approved a $180,000 contract with Dr. Richard Vancalcar as a hospitalist and primary care physician. Vancalcar currently works three days a week at Olympic Medical Physicians’ Primary Care Clinic, 433 E. Eighth St.
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Reporter James Casey can be reached at 360-452-2345, ext. 5074, or at jcasey@peninsuladailynews.com
