GALVESTON — The University of Texas Medical Branch is on schedule to reopen its emergency room at 8 a.m. Saturday, almost a year after Hurricane Ike left it in critical condition.
Crews this week are working all hours to make final touches, including cleaning, painting and wiring, while medical branch employees continued moving in supplies. Doctors and nurses were training this week as the medical branch planned two trial runs before it opened the emergency room.
The emergency room will receive patients by both ground and air ambulance and offer the same level of trauma care it did before the storm struck Sept. 13, officials said.
But unlike before, psychiatric patients needing hospitalization will be transported to other area facilities. It could take five years before the 20-bed psychiatric hospital Rebecca Sealy will return, officials have said.
Closure of the medical branch’s emergency room had worried residents and burdened other trauma centers since the storm, which swamped more than 1 million square feet of medical branch buildings with storm surge.
Before the storm, the medical branch was home to an elite Level 1 trauma center, so designated for having every specialty — neurology, orthopedics and cardiology — in house at all times.
An emergency room is only part of a trauma center. Level 1 trauma centers also must have research and educational components, such as residency programs and outreach efforts in trauma prevention.
Although the pre-Ike trauma services will be available Aug. 1, it could be a few more months before the trauma center can earn the Level 1 designation from The American College of Surgeons, officials have said.
In some Ike-inflicted irony, the medical branch, after laying off about 2,500 people at its campus in November, was compelled to hire outsourcing firm EmCare to rebuild a team of 17 emergency medical faculty members that dissolved out of frustration with the slow recovery of the emergency room.
Officials also launched a campaign to replace 100 nurses lost to the layoffs.
How much the medical branch is paying EmCare and other terms of the contract were not immediately available Tuesday.
The emergency room’s floor is at one of the highest physical elevations on the bayside campus — more than 30 feet above sea level. It never took a drop of storm surge.
But damage at John Sealy Hospital made a swift return of the emergency room impossible, officials say.
Officials have spent months finding new spaces for a blood bank and pharmacy, installing a mobile kitchen and replacing $3.5 million in equipment, including autoclaves to sterilize surgical tools. The hospital, which reopened earlier this year, has about 370 beds, including 100 to treat prisoners. Before Ike, John Sealy Hospital had a 550-bed capacity.
Before the storm, the emergency room treated about 64,000 people a year.
Upon its return, it expects to treat about 44,000 a year, officials said.
