Excela Health limiting visitors at its 3 emergency departments
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Excela Health is asking visitors to the emergency departments at its three hospitals to stay in their vehicles until their loved one is discharged.
Visitors to the emergency departments will be limited effective immediately. Hospital systems around the country have made similar restrictions in recent weeks and months.
Exceptions will be made for those who accompany minors as well as patients who have a cognitive impairment or dementia or another circumstance as determined by the treating physician. One person should be designated per patient for medical staff to share information about the patient’s condition and discharge.
“When our emergency waiting rooms are filled with friends and family members of the ill or injured. They can easily become a hot spot for the spread of infections of all types,” said Dr. Carol Fox, the health system’s Chief Medical Officer. “The rise in other respiratory illnesses coupled with undiagnosed covid-19 puts everyone in close contact at greater risk for becoming an unintended recipient of an easily transmissible infection.”
Excela Health has been experiencing an increase in the overall number of patients as the coronavirus pandemic wears on while the treatment of non-covid ailments has bounced back to pre-covid levels. The health system installed a tent outside its Frick Hospital in Mt. Pleasant in early September to treat patients with minor issues.
The new policy is in place for Frick Hospital, Latrobe Hospital and Westmoreland Hospital in Greensburg.
With nearly 600 total beds among them, the three hospitalssees around 100,000 ER visits each year, according the Excela’s website. Its hospitals treat more than 23,000 people annually as inpatients, with another 700,000 treated as outpatients.