OLOL's North Baton Rouge ER Opens on Wednesday

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Our Lady of the Lake's north Baton Rouge emergency room will not be able to treat patients with the most serious medical problems — such as a gunshot victim — but doctors working in the new eight-bed ER can stabilize these patients and route them to other campuses if necessary, administrators said on a tour of the facility Friday.

The ER will open at 1 p.m. on Wednesday, restoring some emergency care to north Baton Rouge that has been missing for years. But Our Lady of the Lake's north Baton Rouge emergency room cannot offer the same level of treatment as the full-fledged trauma center in the southern part of the parish, which means medical staff mostly will not treat people who have been shot, those who are having heart attacks and stroke victims.

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They expect the north Baton Rouge ER to handle 10,000 to 15,000 visits annually.

One of the most important components of the new emergency room is its connectivity to the urgent care and primary care services already offered at Our Lady of the Lake's LSU Health North Clinic, Sterling said. The emergency room has two interior passageways into the urgent care center.

"The patient can be walked to the urgent care side if it's determined they do not have an emergency medical condition," Sterling said, adding that doing so continues the Lake's ongoing educational campaign about receiving the right care in the right setting.

Our Lady of the Lake is encouraging patients to only visit the emergency room when they need a high level of immediate care, such as in cases of serious head, neck or back injuries, unconsciousness, severe bleeding, difficulty breathing, seizures, severe abdominal pain, eye injuries and broken bones protruding through the skin. The urgent care, on the other hand, is better for treating fevers, sore throats, coughing fits, sprains, strains, minor broken bones, cuts that need stitches and rashes.

Both Earl K. Long and Baton Rouge General officials have said in the past that the number of patients going to their emergency rooms with non-emergency medical conditions was driving up costs. Four out of five of Baton Rouge General's Mid City emergency room patients would have been more appropriately treated in urgent or primary care, while 84 percent of Earl K. Long's patients in 2012 were also going to the ER when they did not have emergencies.

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