South Nassau gets $500,000 for E.R.

It’s “a drop in the bucket” but it’s a start. South Nassau Communities Hospital (SNCH) received a $500,000 grant from the state to renovate its Emergency Room. The total renovation is estimated to cost more than $50 million and will not be completed until at least late 2017.

SNCH hopes to pay for the rest of the renovation through debt financing, a FEMA claim with Long Beach Medical Center, community fundraising and other methods.

“We’re still putting together overall funding of this project,” said Mark Bogen, SNCH’s Senior Vice President and Chief Financial Officer. “The hope is that we can start filing plans sometime in the first quarter of 2015.”

SNCH received the grant through the Long Island office of the Regional Economic Development Council initiative. The Regional Economic Development Council initiative was founded in 2011. Every year, businesses, community organizations and others across the state submit ideas for projects to their regional offices. State agencies choose the winners. Long Island received $81.9 million for projects this year.

“[The emergency room is] sort of woefully undersized for the amount of volume that we do,” Bogen said. He added that 75 percent of the hospital’s admittance comes through the emergency room.

The emergency room was last renovated 10 years ago. “We’re really set up for 30,000 to 35,0000 emergency room [visits] a year,” Bogen said. “But with a lot of things going on here and the closure of Long Beach [Medical Center], we’re now over 65,000 in emergency room [visits] and 25 percent of those become admitted.”

SNCH plans expand the emergency room from 16,000 square feet to 30,000 square feet, which means it will be able to see 70,000 patients a year.

Another goal of the renovation is to better flow with ambulance traffic and to keep adult, pediatric and behavioral health admittances apart from one another. The renovations will be done in stages, as the emergency room needs to remain operational.

SNCH also received $99,601 from the state Department of Labor through the Regional Economic Development Council to train 208 employees in medical coding and technical training, which includes training in electronic medical records.