From an interview with
Dr. Thomas Lewis, Director
McLeod Regional Medical Center, Emergency Department

McLeod Regional Medical Center in Florence has opened its new Emergency Department, which can handle 109,000 patients a year, nearly twice as many as before. The Emergency Department’s  Medical Director Dr. Thomas Lewis describes other patient-centered features.

Here’s an overview of Dr. Lewis’s comments:
The new emergency department at McLeod Regional Medical Center has:

• An expanded unit with 81 patient care beds.
• Five dedicated resuscitation and trauma bays.
• A brand new helipad for the helicopter EMS services.
• For our patients, a roundabout with a covered drop-off.
• Dedicated rooms in the department for seeing and evaluating behavioral health patients.
• A dedicated lab that works exclusively for the emergency department, as well as a pharmacy in the department.
• And a dedicated radiology suite, which includes both plain films and CT scanners.

We’ve built this new emergency department to expand our services to the people of the region. Our former emergency department was built to handle about 56,000 patients a year. We are currently seeing about 75,000 patients a year. So, we outgrew that facility. Our new emergency department will be able to see over a hundred thousand people a year. We are a Level II trauma center, the only one in the area, to take care of more serious trauma injuries without having to transfer those patients elsewhere in the state.

So, one of the most important things with trauma is how long it takes for definitive care and to have our trauma bays located right under the trauma operating rooms is a huge benefit for patients.

In the McLeod emergency department in Florence, we have a full complement of specialties, including physicians from trauma, general surgery, ophthalmology, oncology, nephrology and just about any service line you can think of in medicine. It will allow us to continue the McLeod standard of excellence.