re: Edwards, OLOL officially announce plans for new ER in north Baton Rouge

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The ER will be hooked on to an urgent care center. If people show up at triage with a cold, send them next door to the urgent care center. For things that are above the level of an urgent care, treat them in the ER. stabilize them and then send them to a hospital.

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Most places have fast tracks. Or an express triage protocol nurse who can discharge true bullshite like an earache etc.

I believe liscencing of a hybrid ER/Urgent care is pretty dicey. As is billing. For whatever reasons most places pick one or the other.

Trolls go to ERs because urgent cares do not take Medicaid. Or at least most do not. A hospital based one does. Also, an ER by its nature cannot turn people away. An urgent care can. They also (shady but can happen) can get their fill of M&M patients and refuse to see them. You can always say "needs further eval" and refer to an ER or call 911. ER has to see and evaluate. And transfer. If beyond their capabilities.

ER is the catch all. Nobody cares about the cost of something they are never gonna pay for. They give you their dead grandmas address and the phone number they had 3 phones ago as a contact. But urgent cares CAN ask for payment at or before the time of service, because by its definition you aren't there for an emergency. Just like a doctors office. Try going to your GP or a random GP and tell his staff you are a walk in and don't want to pay a copay or left you card at home? They'll tell you to frick off. You say "I'm too sick to turn away". They'll call 911 for you.

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I don't know a lot about Acadian, why would that be a joke?

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So in EBR, BR EMS runs all 911 emergencies throughout the parish except hospital to hospital emergency transfers and nursing home emergencies.

Acadian does not keep enough units in EBR proper to handle multiple emergencies in the city at once.. they struggle with decent response times in the outlying parishes except for parishes with contracts, or money. For instance Denham mandates like a 15 minute response time... or did at least.

BR EMS does not run air assets... helicopter is acadians

Hopefully like I said earlier, no one with emergent cath lab/OR needs go to this ER. With traffic, I'd anticipate 1hour call for transfer to OLOL door time for transfers

Trauma center at OLOL

And BR metro has a deal with Acadian to furnish air med

No one has to go to NO in the BR metro area.

And Houston and BR are a poor comparison. Houston has more people than all of La.

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Your door to balloon time for these folks are gonna suck

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> 60mins for sure. Probably push 90

Is OLOL a level 1 trauma center?

No, But... OLOL operates as a level 1 and has capabilities 24/7 except for burn unit.

Catch area for OLOL is pretty large. North to Miss border, E of Laffy, half way to Nola.

Some of that may change tho as North Oaks and St Tammany have Neurosurg, North Oaks has trauma surgeons.

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Sounds like the whole thing needs to be blown up and started over.

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You could say that about the whole of health care in Louisiana.

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You could say that about the whole of health care in Louisiana.

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I am originally from the Beaumont area and began my career there. All of Louisiana is like one giant Beaumont.

Pay for nurses is abysmal and docs can't be much better. Every hospital struggles or is bought outright or is shutting down.

And all this while you have a pretty solid (nursing) university system cranking out new grads every 6 months.

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I am originally from the Beaumont area and began my career there. All of Louisiana is like one giant Beaumont.

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Traditionally you had the Charity system, run by religious entities. Other hospitals were run by religions organizations as well. You also had some community owned hospitals.

The charity system eventually become a government owned system. Many of the community hospitals were bought out by the likes of HCA and Tenet.

The poor people always went to the Charity/govt system, and there weren't enough private/insurance pay people living here to justify all the non-govt hospitals, so several closed over time.

And then you have Ochsner. Their model is different. It works for a lot of people, but many people absolutely hate it.

But suffice it to say, the majority of the hospital system in LA is supported by government, either via medicaid/medicare, or via uninsured payments.

Well, here comes expanded Medicaid, which should dramatically reduce government direct funding to hospitals. To me, in an expanded Medicaid system, you don't need government hospitals anymore. You put everyone on Medicaid, and turn the hospitals loose to compete.

Now that there are very few government hospitals anymore, I think our health care system will start, eventually, to look like the rest of the country.

But it's going to take a long time to get there.