CVPH wins $3.5 million to expand emergency department

The Champlain Valley Physicians Hospital in Plattsburgh won a $3.5 million state grant yesterday. Across New York, 17 medical centers were awarded funds as part of a $50 million push to help the facilities operate more efficiently and lower health care costs.

Joyce Rafferty is vice president of finance at CVPH. She says the hospital will use the money to expand the hospital's emergency department. She calls it the "front door" to the community, and she says it needs a make over:

"It's an area where our patient satisfaction has been fairly low and it's mostly because our turn-around time or our ability to get patients into a bed and discharged has been very long. And it's long because we're running way over capacity."

The current facilities were built in 1997, to handle up to 32,000 patients annually. Rafferty says, last year, the emergency department treated 50,000 people:

"Currently we're relying on hallway stretchers to put patients into until we're able to get them discharged or into a patient bed. So, it's extremely cramped."

She says once construction is finished, CVPH will have another seven to nine beds — or treatment bays — for emergency cases. It's not clear when the building project will start. Hospital officials only learned they won the three and a half million-dollar grant yesterday afternoon, when NCPR called for comment.