Dr. Barry Nemon talks about the ER today at the new Chelsea Community Hospital

(Chelsea Update would like to thank Dr. Barry Nemon, director of emergency medicine at Chelsea Community Hospital, for this column.)

In December, 2012, we opened our new ER and it is not only beautiful but also has 20 rooms. Why do we need so many rooms?

There is a room for resuscitation.

There are several rooms that are designed for patients who have mental health complaints.

There is one for ear, nose and throat complaints.

There is even a room that we use for eye injuries.

We have special beds and rooms for doing pelvic exams.

But the majority of the rooms that we have are multiuse, because some days, we see mostly lacerations, and other days we see a lot of chest pain.

Having 20 rooms allows us a lot of flexibility.

As discussed previously, we have a lot of sophisticated tests now – tests that will often give you a diagnosis that would previously have taken weeks to figure out. These tests afford us a wonderful advance in medicine, but they also take a lot of time.

In addition to having more tests available, it is becoming more challenging to care for our population. We are older and heavier than ever before and we have more complicated medical problems, requiring again more testing.

Because of that, some patients will be in our ER for 6 to 8 hours, just getting different tests.

There is one more driver of testing and therefore more beds:  malpractice concerns and our expectations for perfection!

Thirty years ago, 3 percent of the patients we saw in the ER for chest pain and were sent home, ended up having a heart attack!

Today, with all the testing that we do, probably 1.5 percent of the patients we send home end up having a heart attack.

Decreasing the number of patients that we send home with active heart disease from 3 percent to 1.5 percent means doing a lot more testing, requiring more time in the ER and requiring more bed space.

All of the above were reasons why we needed to expand and have more rooms.

What about all those computers you see everywhere in the new ER? Have they been helpful? A good topic to discuss next time.