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Hospital's Emergency Department doubles in size
Hospital's Emergency Department doubles in size
By Robin Earl
Special to the Times-Democrat
In a grand opening slated for Oct. 15, Fauquier Hospital has doubled the size of its Emergency Department (ED) and added new features and upgrades.
“We’ve added a big, beautiful, new waiting room that is going to provide a lot more comfort for our patients,” said Dr. Joseph Servideo, chairman of the Fauquier Hospital Emergency Department.
“We’re also opening up more exam rooms and adding more physicians and clinical staff. All of this means we’ll be able to serve our patients much more quickly.”
The new ED expansion will not only allow for more flexibility during peak patient times, but it will also help the staff adapt to increasing demands created by future growth.
“The hospital administration was very open to making the ED a little larger than what we needed for right now,” Servideo explained. “So this new expansion should easily serve us for the next five to 10 years.”
Veteran ED nurses have seen it all
Lisa Mountjoy, a nurse in the Fauquier Hospital Outpatient Procedures Department and Lois Sutphin, a nurse in the Fauquier Hospital Infusion Center, gathered in the staff lounge and pored over old news clippings from the last 33 years. One article, cut out and stapled into a scrapbook, was torn and faded. The date on the page showed it was from September 1978, three years after Mountjoy graduated from nursing school and joined Fauquier Hospital.
Both women remembered the story well.
“That was when we were still in the ‘old ED’ [a six-bed unit]", Mountjoy said. "Only that week, we had been approved for helicopter transport.”
The newspaper article told of a serious car accident. A 22-year-old man had been pierced with an 8-foot-long board. “It was unbelievable,” said Mountjoy, who was head nurse of the ER at the time. “It went right through him. They had to cut both ends of the board away in order to get him in the ambulance.”
Attending the victim was Dr. Joseph Servideo, the current chairman of the Fauquier Hospital Emergency Department. He was then 34 and in his first year with Fauquier Hospital.
“The board had collapsed his lung, went behind his heart, behind his abdomen and through his bowel," Servideo recalled. "I had never seen anything like it, and I was scared to death.”
Servideo and one of the hospital surgeons got the patient stabilized, and he was airlifted to the Washington Hospital Center, where he was operated on successfully.
Former ED nurses Bernice Pearson and Janice Foley, now both retired, were on the scene that night, too. “It was a small community back then," Foley said. "If something big happened, you heard about it and just went in to help.”
In those early days of helicopter transport, Foley was called on several times to travel with patients on what she called “the MASH helicopters.” She said, “I’d be in the helicopter holding the IV and the patient would be in this big tube, attached to the outside of the helicopter. Sometimes when they didn’t have a medic, they’d ask the nurses to help with transport.”
The good old days
Sutphin, who began working at Fauquier Hospital in 1973, says that the hospital was a very different place back then. “We didn’t have a doctor in the ER all the time. I’d be in the OR, and the bell would ring when there was a patient waiting at the ER door.”
“One night a man arrived with a wire sticking three inches out of his eye," Foley remembered. "I had trouble finding a doctor and when I got one on the phone, he asked, ‘Can you see the wire?’
“I said ‘Yes,’ so he said, ‘Well, pull it out then!’ ”
Because of the frequent absence of an ER doctor, nurses were often required to use their own judgment. Pearson told the story of a night when she was making her rounds and Foley was in the ER. “We heard this small voice say ‘Help.’ We checked the parking lot. No car. No rescue squad. So we went on with our conversation. We heard it again. ‘Help. Someone please help me.’
“We went outside and found a man hanging on to the wall in the parking lot. He had been shot in the leg and was AWOL from the service. We brought him in.”
Foley added, “We didn’t have any security back then. We figured if they can make it as far as the parking lot, that’s good enough for us.
“We had someone come in who had been shot in the chest and wasn’t going to make it," she continued. "A motorcycle gang had been involved in a shootout. About 30 of his friends showed up and said, ‘We want his jacket,’ so I gave it to them.” Later, Foley realized she had given away evidence in the shooting. “I would have given them anything they asked for. They were scary.”
Sutphin said, “We made our own saline, distilled our own water, and prepared our own medicines that we got from Rhodes Drug Store. We used glass bottles for IVs instead of plastic bags.”
“We didn’t wear gloves back then," Mountjoy added. "I remember one man came in who had been hit in the head with an ax. There was a lot of blood, but he was still talking. I held his head together with my bare hands while he was taken to Fairfax. HIV and Hepatitis were unknown back then.”
Thirty years ago, the most common emergencies handled in the ER happened on farms and in car accidents, according to the veteran nurses. “Hay pickers, corn pickers, mower accidents," Sutphin said. "I remember when five people in one family were killed in a car accident. That’s how we got the traffic signal in Remington. One time someone came in whose whole bottom lip had been bitten off by a horse. They sewed it back on.
“I remember one little girl who lost her arm in some machinery. I was scrubbing that little girl’s arm, and I was crying like a baby the whole time.”
Servideo pointed out that emergency room physicians have so many more tools than they did 30 years ago. “Back then, we had X-rays, EKGs and some limited blood work. Now we’ve got CT scanners, MRIs, Dopplar ultrasound and multiple lab tests that can tell us so much more.”
The range of medicines has expanded tremendously, too. “Back in the 1970s, if someone came in with a heart attack, we didn’t have much to offer — some pain relief, oxygen and nitroglycerin. Now, we can give them clot busters that within 20-30 minutes can dissolve the clot that is causing the heart attack.”
Clinicians’ training has changed, too. “Back then,” Servideo said, “we didn’t have the specialty backup that we do now. Acute-care specialties were just coming into being back then. Emergency room doctors were just family doctors who worked in the ER.
“And nurses, although they came out of nursing school very well trained and experienced in hands-on care, didn’t have to have the same skills they do now. In 2008, they need to be able to read heart monitors and work IV pumps, things that didn’t exist back then. We have an extensive program for new nurses that includes lots of lectures and hands-on experience, as well as working alongside experienced nurses.”
A close-knit group
Mountjoy and Sutphin remember the early days of the Fauquier ER as a time when the medical staff worked very closely together.
“It was a much smaller group,” said Mountjoy. “We had six nurses who worked together for years. And the wonderful doctors…Dr. Servideo, Dr. [Eric] Maybach, Dr. [Steven] von Elten worked in the ED back then.”
“A child came in who had run her bike down her driveway into traffic," Mountjoy remembered. "They thought they would have to amputate her leg. Dr. Benjamin Allen was the perfect doctor to help her. He had an artificial leg himself. He was able to offer encouragement and tell the family that their child’s life was not over. He told them how he played tennis and became a ski instructor.”
Foley and Pearson agreed that Fauquier Hospital has been able to attract wonderful doctors.
“When I first started here, we only had general practitioners, no pediatricians, no OB/GYNs, Foley said. "I remember when Dr. [Tom] Meyers [an OB/GYN] first came here to look at Warrenton. He and Dr. [Bob] Young said they walked up and down Main Street and talked to people. They found that people were friendly and that there was a real sense of community. They wanted to start their practices and raise their families here. I’ve heard that kind of story a lot over the years.”
Of all the wonderful people the nurses remember from their early days in the ER, one they speak of most fondly is “Grandma” Ruth Krusie.
Krusie was a legendary nurse whose memory is honored with the hospital’s Ruth Krusie Award, given annually to an outstanding Fauquier Hospital nurse.
Mountjoy, Sutphin, Foley and Pearson all were honored with the award.
“Ruth Krusie was 72 when she passed away, and worked here up until nine months before she died," Mountjoy said. "She was so much fun, and a wonderful nurse. Before she went home every night, she’d tell us, ‘Watch out for the fools.’”
The women also remember the hospital’s snack bar wistfully.
“There was one long counter with some stools, and three or four tables for two people each, Sutphin said. "And there was the famous chicken salad. Volunteers — the chicken pickers — would pull the chicken off the bone. It was wonderful.”
Mountjoy broke in, “And they made the best milkshakes. I liked mine chocolaty, but not too chocolaty. They knew just how many squirts of syrup to use for me.”
Mountjoy recalled that one night, visitors to the hospital cafeteria got a surprise. It seems that a jail inmate set his own mattress on fire and was brought into the ER with burns.
“He escaped and ran buck naked through the hospital — it was a shorter run back then, Mountjoy said. "He ran into the cafeteria looking for something cool to put on his burns.
“He scared the cafeteria ladies, but one of the nurses ordered him into the shower.”
The nurses maintain that health care was much more of a hands-on proposition years ago. “Because the staffs were so much smaller, the head nurse was not only overseeing and supervising, she was another nurse on the floor,” Mountjoy said.
Sutphin remembered one day when the nurses would have preferred not to be so “hands-on.”
“There was a bomb scare at the hospital in 1969. Bernice [Pearson], then head nurse of the medical surgery unit, called us in and told us, ‘The bomb is supposed to go off at 7. So until five to seven, we’re going to search for the bomb.’
“I was only 17 and said, ‘I’m too young to be doing that. I’m going home.’
“Bernice said, ‘No, you’re not.’
“So we all looked for the bomb.”
Nurses did what needed to be done, agreed all four veteran nurses. Foley remembered a time when there was a shootout at a big country music concert in town. “I saw someone was shot, so I started to jump down and help. Bullets were flying. My husband pulled me back and said, ‘You can’t do that!’ ”
Pearson said with a smile, “Yes, Janice was one of those ‘eager’ nurses.”
All four nurses have deep ties to Warrenton. Pearson’s mother, Inez Gray, was also a Fauquier Hospital nurse, when the hospital was located in a house on Waterloo Street. “‘Lady Gray,’ everyone called her," Pearson said. Pearson has been married for 40 years to Raye Pearson, a police officer she met in the ER.
Foley married Charles Foley, who was a prosecutor for the county, then a judge.
“One night, when I was pregnant, a drunk gave me a hard time, Foley said. "He was chasing me around the exam room, and I had to call for help.
“The next day he told Charles that a nurse beat him up the night before in the ER.
“Charles told him, ‘I heard about you at about 2 in the morning from that very nurse.’ ”
That was then, this is now
How do the nurses compare today’s brand-spanking new 33-room ED to the six-bed ER of 35 years ago?
“I love the fact that there are all private rooms,” said Sutphin. “We used to have all the patients in one room, separated by curtains. And we have all state-of-the-art equipment. The new ED is just beautiful.”
When asked what he thinks of the new ED, Servideo grins broadly. “It’s fantastic. Having our own CT scanner is a dream come true. We have everything we need to provide the best possible care. You won’t find another ED anywhere that is better equipped.”
Sidebar
Historical perspective
83 years of healing at Fauquier Hospital
With today's unveiling of the new Emergency Department at Fauquier Hospital, Fauquier Health finishes an expansion that began in 2001 with the addition of a new patient tower and continued to include a complete renovation of every segment of the hospital.
It’s a very different place, physically and philosophically, than it was even a few years ago.
In the beginning
But the hospital’s history began much earlier: It was founded in 1925 as a 20-bed hospital in a former residence at 32 Waterloo Street in Warrenton. It was known as Fauquier County Hospital and admitted 344 patients that first year. One-hundred and eighty-four operations were completed and 57 emergency treatments. Twenty-two babies were born.
In 1940, after finding it could not compete with other area hospitals, the tiny hospital closed. It opened again in 1942 as Physician’s Hospital, Inc. and did well until 1954, when it again suspended operations briefly.
Supported by a wave of community support, the hospital was purchased with donated funds and reopened again on Waterloo Street as a non-profit, and was named Fauquier Hospital.
As demand for health care began to increase dramatically, plans were made to purchase a bigger site and build a new hospital. The Hospital Hill facility, at 56 beds, was dedicated on Nov. 16, 1958.
In 1960, Fauquier Hospital was accredited by the Joint Commission on Accreditation for Healthcare Organizations. (This body is still responsible for hospital accreditations.) At that time, 58 full-time personnel were employed, including 19 registered nurses.
Two events in the 1960s made the hospital even more important to Fauquier County’s residents: the opening of a free maternity clinic, which provided no-cost health care to new mothers who could not afford it; and the hospital’s accreditation by the Social Security Administration to provide Medicare services.
Growing steadily
Under pressure from increased demand, the hospital added: the Tom Frost Wing in 1967; a new newborn nursery and pediatric care unit in 1972; a new ICU, expanded radiology and physical therapy departments, pharmacy and operating room suite, and a new emergency room (with helipad), laboratory, central supply area, administration and business office areas in 1979; the J. North Fletcher Wing in 1985; and the Bill Green cardiac care unit in 1986.
Rodger Baker, the hospital’s current president and CEO, first stepped into those shoes in 1985, but began with the hospital as assistant administrator in 1977. “I was 26 years old,” he said. “I’ve been here longer than that now (31 years).”
Baker remembered, “In 1977, the ED was two rooms, and one of those rooms had an examination table that the doctor also used as a desk.
“We didn’t have outpatient services back then. If someone came in for an operation, they’d be prepped in the emergency room and come back to the emergency room to recover afterward.”
“I remember I started work on a Tuesday, and we dedicated eight new ICU beds that Saturday. We were under construction then, and I didn’t have an office.”
Baker has guided the hospital’s vision through many significant changes since.
The hospital’s Home Health division was created in 1985 and a 60-bed expandable long-term care facility, later to be known as Warrenton Overlook Health and Rehabilitation Center, was approved in 1986 and built in the early 1990s.
Lois Sutphin, a veteran nurse in the Infusion Center, said she remembers Baker when he first joined the hospital back in the late 1970s. “He always came to our weekly meetings. He listened to us, and encouraged us to communicate with each other and to work together.”
Warrenton’s hospital today
The latest and most ambitious of the renovations at the hospital began in 2001, when work began on a five-story patient tower. It was then that the hospital embraced the Planetree concept, which revolutionized the hospital’s vision and governed those renovations, which were completed in 2005.
Under Baker’s leadership, Fauquier Hospital in 2007 became one of only five hospitals in the country to earn the Planetree designation for patient-centered care, and its influence can be seen in every corner of the facility — from the operating room to The Bistro on the Hill, the hospital’s extraordinary cafeteria.
The latest phase of renovations has resulted in a 33-room Emergency Department, with a myriad of features designed to make patient visits easier and faster.
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