Cambridge Memorial Hospital’s emergency room isn’t moving, but the entrance for its patients is.
At 7 a.m. Wednesday, the hospital’s current emergency entrance will become inaccessible to the general public.
“We are relocating our emergency intake zone, which is a triage and registration zone … to the front of the hospital,” says Angelo Presta, the hospital’s director of capital redevelopment.
It’s a two-year-plus arrangement designed to keep things flowing smoothly as construction continues on CMH’s $250-million expansion.
For anyone driving to the hospital, the turn off Coronation Boulevard will be made at a new set of lights east of the usual entrance.
A new visitor parking lot has been set up behind the hospital, near the new main entrance.
The emergency entrance will move to the front of the hospital.
Once inside, patients will be questioned by a triage nurse and escorted or told to follow a blue line to the emergency room itself.
“We have spent a lot of time … trying to figure out how we can get patients from the new triage registration area to the emergency department as quickly and safely as possible,” says Paul Lacey, a clinical educator at the hospital.
Anyone arriving at the hospital via ambulance will be taken straight to the emergency room, without stopping at the triage station.
Construction at the current emergency room entrance is expected to be complete by the winter of 2017, with the entire expansion project scheduled to wrap up in the spring of 2019.
