Numbers like:

People from North BR are dying because they take longer to get to the ER in Baton Rouge now that there's no BR General or EKL! It takes two minutes longer now than it was to get to an ER!

quote:
Earlier this year, The Advocate reported it takes ambulances two minutes longer on average to transport patients to an emergency room today than it did in 2012. Those statistics are not limited to north Baton Rouge patients, by the way. It’s a citywide average.

Whoops. I'm sure that's just a slight oversight though.

What's next...oh yeah...remember the numbers folks were throwing around?

"It will only take $3,000,000.00 to make a free-standing ER a reality in North Baton Rouge!"

quote:
The local Champion facility has more than 40,000 square feet of unused space, which Next Health says it can turn into a satellite emergency room—provided state and local governments pony up about $6.5 million to build it, plus another $3 million in annual subsidies to keep it afloat.

So we go from 3 million to 9.5 million? The actual cost is more than triple what you lowballed us on? My b. My b. We forgot to round off, carry a few 0's. You know how it is with Common Core nowadays right?

What else? What else...Oh...Remember when they said they needed that free-standing ER to save lives? Well, about that...

quote:
The reality of satellite emergency rooms, such as the one proposed by Next Health, is that they are not able to deliver to critically ill or severely injured patients the appropriate level of care because they don’t have the specialists on staff ready to diagnose a stroke or surgically remove a gunshot wound to the gut.

:wat?

quote:
The Louisiana Emergency Response Network tracks this kind of information. It’s a 10-year-old state agency that coordinates care among the state’s emergency responders, and its job is to make sure critically ill and injured patients get to the nearest emergency facility that can deliver the best care. According to LERN Executive Director Paige Hargrove, there are only two circumstances under which LERN would direct EMTs to a satellite ER—when patients have a blocked airway or when they’re in cardiac arrest. Not heart attack. Cardiac arrest.

Really? Hmmm. That's an eye-opener. Go on...

quote:
“Even if a patient was shot in the abdomen on the front steps of Champion, I would still direct them to the Lake,” she told me recently. “I’m not trying to be negative about the establishment of any kind of facility in north Baton Rouge, but I don’t want people to be confused into thinking they have a standalone emergency department that can take care of critical injuries.”

Okay, so that's not exactly reassuring for folks who are being asked to spend close to $10,000,000 in this budget climate is it?

The rest of this fairly informative article can be found here. What's surprising to me is that I think its safe to say that based on previous experience with the author's work, Steph's a pretty liberal gal for Baton Rouge's taste. IMO anyway.

This was a pretty big takedown of all that bluster coming from the Blue Ribbon Commission Crowd...

This post was edited on 6/13/16 at 12:09 pm