SUMTER, S.C. — Sumter’s Prisma Health Tuomey Hospital is wrapping up the first phase of a nearly $16 million project to expand its emergency department.
By the end of this month, the new ER will be open and ready to serve the Sumter community
Residents like Chris Nelson say wait times can be long.
“I'll tell you the truth. They kind of slow,” Nelson shares. “One day I was here. And I was here, like, already waited three hours. So I just got up and left and went home, came back three hours later. They said my name was still [on the list]. And then when I got back there, they was just calling me to the bed.”
It’s feedback State House Representative David Weeks says he’s heard
“I represent a lot of folks who complain about the emergency room. People complain, but they never complain about the doctors and the nurses in the healthcare staff. It was mostly about the facilities. So we're now at a place where we can say to those citizens where you're complaining but you can't complain about this because Team Sumter has worked together to make it,” Weeks shared, standing in the new ER. “Team Sumter is not an emblem or a statement that we put on the shirt and wear it around for show. It represents our spirit and what we are all about in this community. So we wear it proudly and we are so happy Prisma has been an important part of Team Sumter.”
Patients aren’t utilizing the new space quite yet, but Tuomey says they’ll be welcome by the end of September.
“We built the existing ER in 1999. And the year that we moved in, we outgrew it. So we've known for a long long time the ER needed to be rebuilt, but then as Sumter’s grown and healthcare needs of the aging population has grown, we just knew that there was no way our ER — the current ER that was about 43,000 is where we maxed out — there was no way we can meet the needs of the Sumter community,” Chief Nursing Officer Susan Gaymon says. “We don't take care of strangers here. We take care of each other, our families, our neighbors. We know people when they come in and if you don't know them, you know somebody who does know them. So it makes it very special to take care of people who live here.”
Prisma Health Midlands Chief Executive Officer Michael Bundy says the 13 new beds and 13,000 extra square feet will help increase capacity by 33%.
“It's not uncommon for us to see 170, 180 patients a day, 50,000 a year,” Bundy explains. “We want to create the access and capacity to be able to serve 65,000 patients a year so that no citizen of this community who ever needs care has to wait for it.”
When it comes to those wait times, Gaymon says they are dependent on acuity.
“You may come in with chest pain, having a heart attack and you get right in and we get you right out, send you to the heart hospital in Prisma, or if you have something less acute unfortunately you some days wait four or five hours. Is it something we're proud of? Absolutely not. We want to make that better,” Gaymon tells me. “We don't want people in our community having long waits. So I truly believe the design of this ER will really help us reduce those wait times and the Sumter community will be able to see improved health care in a timely manner.”
In addition to cutting down wait times, Bundy says this new renovation also might help the hospital recruit more physicians.
“We've had some great success in recent years recruiting here expanding cardiology, expanding robotic surgery, expanding neurology,” Bundy shares. “But facilities like this absolutely enhances the story that we tell as we recruit physicians from out of the community.”
The hospital says now that phase one is finished, it will start to undergo construction on the old emergency department soon.
Phase two is expected to be finished in early 2024, and then phase three is slated for spring 2025.
“That's so that's a good thing,” Nelson shares. “Maybe they’ll flow a little quicker this time.”
Tuomey is also planning to add a crisis stabilization unit as a part of this project's third phase, which will upgrade the current trauma space. This means patients who are in need of mental health care and evaluations can be sent to this hospital, instead of waiting for space at the Sumter County Detention Center.
Late last month, a 26-year-old woman was found unresponsive in her cell. Hosanna Dinkins’ family and law enforcement says she had been at the local jail for months, without criminal charges, waiting for a bed to open at a state mental health facility.
State House Speaker Murrell Smith of Sumter says patients in the area can receive better mental health care with the addition of a crisis stabilization unit.
“We've learned a hard lesson in this community lately about mental health and access to health care and mental health. And one of the great things that we were able to do is to partner with Prisma and Prisma take the lead over providing a crisis stabilization unit at this hospital to make sure that we serve the needs of the community,” Smith explains. “That we don't put them in the detention center. And we don't put them in other places where they cannot get access to health care, mental health and behavioral health services. We can do all that here in Sumter and in this facility here.”
Bundy says phase three will be a partnership with the USC School of Medicine and local hospital leadership, who will work together to design the unit.